MOSCOW -- After living with deceit and the KGB for more than 70 years, the Russian Orthodox Church is desperately trying to resurrect itself.

A nation caught in a dark moral vacuum is turning to the church, searching for meaning to life. Politicians who have lost their Communist authority are seeking legitimacy in church-inspired nationalism.

This would seem the perfect moment for the church to emerge as a powerful national leader, but these staggering demands are being made upon an institution that was perhaps the most battered and humiliated of all by Communist rule. The church survived the assault, but only barely. Today it is decimated in size and remains more KGB, perhaps, than the KGB.

Reformers are shaking up the KGB, but the church is still controlled by clerics who came to power when church offices could be filled only upon approval of the secret police agency.

As it attempts to emerge from those unhappy days, the church finds itself immersed more in struggles for power, privilege and property than in spiritual renewal.

Those struggles are being played out in often unpleasant ways as the Moscow patriarchy tries to regain buildings seized by the state and as it seeks to fight off the claims of church leaders who fled abroad rather than submit to communism.

"I think it's fair to say the church is run by the same people who ran it in the good old days of the KGB," says Michael Bourdeaux, a British scholar who has made a career of studying Russian Orthodoxy.

Some priests estimate that half of their number have strong connections to the KGB.

While the KGB itself says it intends to give up its control of the church, the connection has left a legacy of suspicion, both at home and abroad.

Even worse, many clerics have been unable to free themselves psychologically from the old ways, says Victor Popkov, a dissident who was imprisoned for religious activity in the '70s.

"The clergy are used to living under control," Mr. Popkov says, "and this habit can't disappear instantly.

"It used to be very easy. You just had to telephone and ask, 'Should I do this or not?' Now it is difficult for those who want to be free and independent and responsible for their deeds. They ** don't know how to do it."

Though many compromised shamefully, the years of persecution and denial generated heroism among some churchmen. The Rev. Gleb Yakunin is one of those revered figures.

In the mid-'60s Father Gleb methodically documented religious persecution in the Soviet Union and sent the evidence abroad, helping to begin the democratic movement in the Soviet Union.

At the behest of the KGB, the church imposed a ban of silence on him. When that expired, the KGB imprisoned him for 8 1/2 years.

Father Gleb remains an active member and reformer of the church. He was recently elected to the Russian Parliament, even though his bishop forbade him to run.

Following his example, young idealistic priests are beginning to assert themselves in the churches that reopen almost daily: Over the last three years the number of working churches has doubled to 12,000, though still nowhere near the 50,000 that thrived before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Priests are in short supply -- the seminaries have few people trained to teach, testimony to the effectiveness of the persecution. After the Revolution, 100 of the church's 120 bishops were killed, along with about 20,000 of the 100,000 priests. Today there are about 12,000 priests.

After decades of repression, people are flocking to church in ever-growing numbers. Catechism classes are formed in secrecy for fear that if the word gets out, too many people would have to be turned away.

"The shortage of priests is catastrophic," says the Rev. George Kochetkov. "The priests are overwhelmed. They have no rest day and night. That's why many can only wave incense and sprinkle water."

Father George, now 40, was a political economist studying at a Leningrad seminary in 1983 when the KGB prevented his ordination because he was attracting too many people to church.

"I spoke up about the KGB to my colleagues at the seminary," Father George says. "But I was not alone. There were many courageous people who didn't compromise and were sent to distant parishes without the possibility of church positions. It was the reality of our life for 70 years. Even in the church building, the priest was prohibited from preaching."

Father George says the church's former accommodation with communism is now being used by enemies to discredit it unfairly.

"It's similar to after the Revolution when the church was persecuted as part of the czarist structure," he says. "Now it is persecuted as part of the KGB structure. There is some truth to it, of course. But I think now we have a historic period when we can create the basis for the church to flourish. . . . The people have to gain confidence in the church."

On a dark, damp Sunday morning, nearly 100 of Father George's parishioners are jammed inside an old cathedral hidden by trees, only a few blocks from the KGB headquarters in Moscow.

This building, the Sretensky Monastery Cathedral, built in 1679, is one of many that has been officially returned to the Russian Orthodox Church -- but only on paper. After many years as a dormitory for the KGB, it was turned over to the Ministry of Culture. The ministry uses it as a workshop to restore sculpture.

The artists' refrigerator sits on the altar, and the once-glorious sanctuary has been turned into a corridor, lined with roughly partitioned workshops.

Yet, every Sunday people squeeze in shoulder to shoulder to stand among wheelbarrows for the four-hour service to worship God.

Father George believes that Aleksy II, the patriarch of Moscow and of All Russia, can lead the church into the future. The 62-year-old patriarch became an archbishop in 1964, when anyone in religious authority was carefully scrutinized and approved by the KGB. While Father Gleb was in prison, the future patriarch was considered reliable enough to travel abroad. But he took a pro-Gorbachev stand during the August coup attempt.

Father Viacheslav says that that won the patriarch tremendous moral standing.

Followers of the New York-based Russian Church Abroad disagree, says the Rev. Andrei Osetrov, a member of a Church Abroad enclave in Suzdal, about 80 miles northeast of Moscow.

"The Moscow patriarchy is a Stalinist organization founded in 1943 after the complete destruction of the Russian Church," Father Andrei says. "The foreign church is the only lawful heir of the Russian Church."

Mr. Popkov says that the Orthodox Church feels threatened by the church abroad and that there have been nasty fights between them over property returned from the state. "This question of church buildings is a problem of power," he says.

Father Viacheslav concedes that the Orthodox Church has erred. "When believers asked questions, the church gave no answers or lied," he says. "It was a tragedy."

Mr. Bourdeaux, who recently published a book called "The Gospels' Triumph over Communism," notes, "There's still a great deal of suspicion and hostility.

"The people who compromised are trying to cover it up, understandably. If only they could say, 'I'm sorry, I made a mistake.' "