As Moscow commemorates the grim anniversary of last year's fighting in the heart of the city, the question of how many people died in the fighting last Oct. 3-4 remains a political battlefield.


The blackened shell of the White House has long since been repaired and the last of the dead have been buried. But the opposition to President Boris Yeltsin, branding the president a criminal, still maintains that there has been an official cover-up of the true number of dead.


The numbers cited vary from the outlandish -- 26,000 in the communist newspaper Borba -- to more credible claims of a few hundred dead.


According to the Public Prosecutor's office, a total of 147 people died in the two days of violence. Forty-four of these were killed at the Ostankino television center on Oct. 3, the rest died in the vicinity of the parliament building, the White House. A spokesman for the Public Prosecutor's office said Monday the figure still stood and declined to comment further.


But Georgy Gusev, a member of an opposition memorial committee for the dead that was formed after the events, said he possesses a list of 169 dead. On Sunday, marchers in the opposition's day of remembrance carried placards bearing 169 names. Gusev said there had been a massacre of several hundred people which had then been covered up.


Alexander Sokolov, a bearded, mild-mannered doctor from the human rights group Memorial, has spent a year conducting interviews and sifting through the gruesome evidence of Oct. 3-4. After months of painstaking work he can take you down a twisting road of arguments for the cover-up theory.


His preliminary conclusions are not pleasing to either side in the debate: "It looks as though the number of dead may exceed the official figures by several dozen." "It was a mistake that Yeltsin declared the number of dead immediately afterwards," Sokolov said. "By the laws of Soviet bureaucracy he couldn't be corrected."


The most sinister testimonies came to light in two Moscow crematoria.


Most nights of the year the Moscow government cremates the unidentified corpses of unfortunates off the streets and those too poor to be paid for, at its own expense. It does so in two crematoriums, primarily the Nikolo-Arkhangelsky, but also sometimes the Khovansky, if there is a lot of work to be done.


Crematorium workers told Memorial that on three nights running -- Oct. 5, 6 and 7 -- there were unusually large deliveries of corpses in plastic bags and boxes to the two crematoriums. The vehicles bringing the corpses did not bear the names of the companies which usually brought them, and the usual paperwork was not gone through.


One worker at the Khovansky crematorium told Memorial there had been 58 corpses on the first night, 27 on the second and nine on the third. For several nights before and after those dates there were no cremations at the crematorium.


It is possible, Sokolov said, that these were corpses of White House defenders, removed secretly from the building and disposed of.


But there are other possible explanations. The Moscow authorities, fearing violence because of the siege of the White House, may have ordered a clearing out of unidentified corpses from its morgues to make way for potential victims, said Sokolov. The cremation of these corpses may have been fixed for those three nights.One suspicious statistic, Sokolov said, is the number of Muscovites among the official list of victims. Of 119 civilian victims, 91 were from Moscow and the Moscow region. This comes as a surprise to eyewitnesses of the White House who saw many people from the Russian regions and former Soviet republics defending the building.


But this can also be explained. All the workers who stayed inside the building, as well as the zevaki, the "gawkers" who came out onto the street and were killed by stray bullets, were from Moscow. These two groups may have tilted the casualty figures.


Many people were incredulous when the battle was over that so few people had apparently died after a sustained artillery bombardment of the parliament building.


Sokolov said that did not worry him. From his information, many people had left the building before the attack began and there were "a lot fewer than a thousand" left inside. Furthermore the tank shells hit the upper floors of the building while most people were safe in the Council of Nationalities hall, deep inside.


The opposition's weakest card is that it cannot produce dozens of relatives who have lost their loved ones without trace. Gusev of the commemoration committee, questioned on this, said there were many such relatives, but they had been intimidated by the police when they asked about their missing loved ones.


Sokolov agreed that it was surprising that every last one of the 147 official dead has been identified and buried. He would have expected several homeless people or anonymous White House volunteers to have died in the fighting.


The investigator admitted he himself does not have a final opinion. Memorial plans to publish its final report only in December.