* Robert Rozhdestvensky, 62, one of the Russian poets who turned verse into a symbol of spiritual freedom in the early post-Stalin years, died yesterday after a long illness, the Itar-Tass news agency reported. Mr. Rozhdestvensky stuttered but it did not prevent him from giving mass recitals in the 1960s, sometimes filling Moscow's giant Luzhniky soccer stadium. The poet never showed disloyalty to the Soviet state but his flamboyant verse helped break the stranglehold of socialist realism that gripped poetry during the decades of Stalin's iron rule.

* Theodore Conrad, 84, who distilled modern architecture as a model maker and defended historic architecture as a preservationist, died Friday at his home in Jersey City, N.J., of congestive heart failure. In 1931, when he was a student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., he began making architectural models. He was a pioneer in the use of Plexiglas and metal for models, rather than the traditional wood and cardboard, and he earned increasingly high-profile commissions. Many modern landmarks, such as New York's Museum of Modern Art and Seagram Building, assumed their earliest three-dimensional form in his Jersey City studio.