CRACKER CRUMBS:

IT IS ALMOST impossible to pick up the New York Times and not see a story about the new "glasnost" in the Soviet Union. But where is this "glasnost?"

Soviet soldiers still kill in Afghanistan.

About 300 political prisoners have been released from the Gulag; thousands remain.

Four-hundred-thousand Jews still may not emigrate. There is no "glasnost" for them.

"Glasnost" exists, but it does not reach much beyond intellectuals, artists, prominent dissidents, and the pages of The Times. Common Soviet citizens may feel more free, but how free "glasnost" has really made them is not clear.

"Glasnost" may be a cynical political maneuver or a bold opening limited by strongly entrenched bureaucratic interests.

Whichever it is, it points to the same inescapable conclusion: regardless of leaders' intentions, some basic features of the Soviet system remain, like repression.

ADD ONE MORE abomination to the list that the 1980s have brought us. If beer funnels, neo-conservativism, and the core curriculum weren't bad enough, now there are child leashes.

It would be easy to blow the child leash problem out of proportion. The press could manufacture a "child leash crisis;" editorial writers and dining hall philosophers could compare it to the drug epidemic and the breakup of the nuclear family; and the country could go into another orgy of "What kind of a society are we?" introspections. That would be overreacting to another 1980s abomination.

A close look at child leashes explains the problem with the recent child leash phenomenon: I don't like them. I was a kid, and I was a pain in the neck sometimes. Memories of what it felt like to careen around like a pinball while my mother was trying to buy groceries make my emotions twinge when I see a kid on a leash. My head tells me child leashes are a small thing and there is a reason for them. My heart tells me to put up a sign in the Square that says, "Children must keep their parents leashed at all times."