RUDNY, Kazakhstan -- The people of Rudny have taken to pedaling about on bicycles, giving its windswept boulevards the air of a Beijing on the steppe.


Petrol for their cars is too expensive. The international telephone exchange closes down at 10 P.M. for lack of demand. Salaries are paid late, if at all, and sometimes in sugar instead of money.


It is a sad fate for a city which was once a proud jewel of Soviet industry.


Situated in northern Kazakhstan but populated mainly by Russian speakers, Rudny feels ignored.


"Moscow does not give a damn about us, Alma-Ata also does not give a damn," said a middle-aged engineer in the city of 120,000, referring to the Kazakh capital by its Soviet name.


"We have built this city and look what we have got now," echoed an elderly woman. "We have been turned into beggars who do not know what will happen to them tomorrow."


The plight of Rudny, set in rolling steppes, is symptomatic of much of the north of the second largest former Soviet republic, stretching from the Chinese border to the Caspian Sea.


Nearly 40 percent of Kazakhstan's 17 million people are ethnic Russians, and the increasingly uneasy relations between them and their Kazakh rulers is one of President Nursultan Nazarbayev's greatest headaches.


Kazakhstan's nuclear weapons, its biggest industrial plants and formerly top-secret weapons factories are all in the Russian-dominated north. Unrest here could have serious repercussions.


Recently, an angry crowd of some 2,000 elderly people gathered in Rudny's central Lenin Ploshchad to demand that they be paid their pensions, overdue for three months.


When officials failed to turn up at the rally, a delegation of pensioners marched to the city hall and forced the local mayor out into the square.


There a group of elderly women attacked him with walking sticks and umbrellas. They let him go, bruised, several minutes later.


At the heart of Rudny's problems is its former pride -- a huge iron-ore enrichment plant, one of the largest in the former Soviet Union.


The city's wellbeing depends on the plant, which employs 22,000 people. Most other residents are relatives of plant workers or employed in related companies. Now the plant faces bankruptcy, people who work there said.


Its main customer is Russia's Magnitogorsk conglomerate, which still orders Rudny's output but fails to pay for it, probably because of non-payment by its own customers.


Mounting corporate debt has created havoc in the economies of the post-Soviet states. Industrial output is falling sharply both in Russia and in Kazakhstan and less and less metal is needed.


Salaries are paid months in arrears and employees recently received a 10 kilogram bag of sugar in lieu of part of their pay.


The plant's decline has had a strong impact on the city.


People have not seen pasta in shops for months. Bread disappears from shop shelves by afternoons.


Fresh fruit and vegetables from shops are beyond the budgets of most people, who depend heavily on garden plots.


Kazakhstan's industrial output fell 29 percent in the first six months of this year, compared to the same period of 1993. Hundreds of enterprises are totally idle, operating below capacity or on short working weeks, the government said.


Many expect Kazakhstan's economic crisis to worsen this year as a tight-credit policy begins to bite and prices to rise. An expected new law on bankruptcy may cast thousands into the ranks of the long-term unemployed.


Nazarbayev denies that ethnic tensions compromise the stability of Kazakhstan but is careful in his speeches not to alienate local Russians.


In Rudny, where war memorials and statues still recall a glorious Soviet past, people now resent the Kremlin for deserting them almost as much as they deride their renamed capital Almaty, 1,200 kilometers to the south.


Russia's border lies just 200 kilometers away and most of those able to find a future in their motherland have already gone there. Some work there all week, returning only at the weekend.


Shop clerks here call Kazakhstan's tenge currency as "rubles." Few Russians speak Kazakh, a Turkic language.


Some residents of Rudny have not yet got accustomed to the reality that Moscow is no longer their master.


Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin visited Kazakhstan recently, and his trip coincided with the iron-ore plant's 40th anniversary. A plant official complained during a festival ceremony: "Why is Chernomyrdin going to other places? He should come here and put things in order," he said, apparently oblivious to the fact that he was speaking of a foreigner.