BOOK REVIEW : An Airing of Works by Russian Women : GLAS: NEW RUSSIAN WRITING NO. 3: WOMEN’S VIEW; <i> Natasha Perova and Andrew Bromfield, eds.</i> ; Distributed by Zephyr Press $9.95; 238 pages

While the first number of “Glas” was being prepared last year, tanks were lined up in front of its offices near the Russian Parliament; an episode in the coup that was attempting to bring back the Communist hard-liners.

Inside, meanwhile, the building manager was trying to evict the staff so that he could sign a capitalist-style lease with foreign investors.

So “Glas” was born, bumpily joined to the contradictions of its time and its society. It is a quarterly devoted to the work of new Russian writers in English translation. The contradictions of our own time and society--what we need to read is not always published, while a great deal that we don’t need to read is--have seen to it that the quarterly’s first two numbers were only spottily available in the United States.

Now, Zephyr Press, a wispy publisher that managed to bring out a mammoth and much-praised English translation of the complete works of Anna Akhmatova, has taken over distribution. The result is issue No. 3, devoted to woman writers.

Ten are represented. They range in age from 28 to 60, but none has been published or publishable except in the last very few years. Their styles vary. Some are harshly realist, one or two are fabulists or satirists, and one of the poets is a surrealist. But virtually every one of them denounces the oppressiveness of being a woman in Russia; whether it is through the oppressive conformity of the past or the oppressive disorder of the present.

They vary considerably in quality, as well; and in some cases--as, for example, with the poet Elena Schwartz--the translations do not really cope with the material. “Glas” is hard-up, and the opening of Russian society means that translators are in demand, and at competitive rates.

On the other hand, the beautiful memoir “Childhood in Post-War Moscow” by Larissa Miller shines through a translation that is merely adequate.

Even the cruder or weaker pieces convey to us both revelation and shock. At the most obvious level, this shock comes from the portraits of Russian men and their treatment of women.

There is the arrogant labor-hostel thug and his feral, half-demented girlfriend in Svetlana Vasilenko’s “Shamara.” There is Galina Scherbakova’s Masha, who tries ineffectually to become a prostitute, only to be stiffed and beaten up by her first client.

More appalling, there is a factual account of the so-called “Kolyma Streetcar”--the gang rapes that took place in some of the Siberian gulags. Elena Glinka writes of her own experience. When the convoy of women prisoners arrived at the camp near Lake Okhotsk, hundreds of men turned up from miles around. Most of the women were common criminals, along with a few politicals including a student who, one suspects, was Glinka herself.

The men were fishermen, miners, engineers, geologists. The guards were bribed and stupefied with vodka. The women were taken into a building and raped continually for three days. The dead were thrown outside; those who were merely unconscious were revived with cold water. The student, Glinka writes, was lucky. A local party official claimed her for himself.

“The miners respected him: he was fair, he was straight with the workers and treated them as equals: he was politically educated and morally sound.” Those lines convey almost more horror than the horrors that precede them. The gulag has vanished; the “morally sound” men are still there.

There is a less extreme but entirely desolate picture in one of several scintillating poems by Nina Iskrenko, a star of the collection. A mother, exhausted with coping, is scolded by her husband for being duller than his girlfriend:

When I have insomnia

And a bin full of laundry

When I confuse the kids

With dinosaurs

And take the favorable disposition of the heavens

For mere politeness . . .

I hear the drowsy half-irked crackle of a match

And smoke creeps under the door. It’s you

Starting to nag me about the other woman . . .

My forehead bursts with the strain of imagining

The other woman’s sexy seductive capacity to cope

With our level of civilization . . .

“Our level of civilization.” If the men are appalling, it is not just a matter of individuals or a gender. Even in the clumsier stories there’s never a doubt that society is responsible. Not in a theoretical or abstract way. Russian writers have traditionally made society as palpable as American writers have traditionally made mothers.

Or, to be more exact, society’s absence. In fact, beneath the 70-year carapace of an all-embracing social ideology, there was a void. Except at certain privileged levels, Soviet life was a swamp of individual arrangements, hidden from the light. In this murkiness there was no genuine society, and without society, women are nakedly at the mercy of the male.