What was going on when I was born?

MOSCOW T HERE was a sense of repetition in Moscow last week as talk of an Olympic boycott swept the streets, echoing the themes of the United States-led boycott of the 1980 games in the Soviet capital. But the roles were reversed this time. Now it was Soviet athletes arguing that it was impossible to compete in a nation as aggressive as the United States under President Reagan, while Washington issued statements arguing that sports should not be polluted by politics. The official explanation Moscow offered for staying away - one quickly taken up by Bulgaria, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Vietnam, Laos and Mongolia, with others yet to come - was that rampant anti-Sovietism had made Los Angeles and the games unsafe for socialist participation. But the motives seemed far more profound than apprehension about demonstrators, who in any event are an occupational hazard for Soviet delegations abroad.

An internal report by the director of the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration calls a new program in President Reagan's war on drugs a ''liability.'' He says its ''alleged grandiose accomplishments'' will ''become this Administration's Achilles' heel for drug enforcement.'' The official, Francis M. Mullen Jr., has sent his six-page report on the National Narcotic Border Interdiction System to his immediate supervisor, Attorney General William French Smith. It says the border system, established last year to coordinate Federal agencies' efforts to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the United States, has accomplished little but has taken credit for other agencies' successes. The report quotes an unidentified former border system employee, a Coast Guard lieutenant commander, who calls the system ''an intellectual fraud.''

Faced with another near-desperate situation tonight, the Islanders again responded with a victory, this one by 6-1, to tie their Stanley Cup championship series against the Edmonton Oilers. The Islanders had dropped the opener, 1-0, on Thursday, marking the fourth straight series of these playoffs in which the Islanders had fallen behind. Tonight's game was critical because the next three games of the four-of- seven final are in Edmonton. So the Islanders, seeking a record- equaling fifth straight championship, picked a fine time to generate the most one-sided victory in a Stanley Cup final since 1973.

WASHINGTON P OLITICAL moods in Washington often last, as a Scandinavian Ambassador put it, ''about as long as the flight of a chicken.'' Just three weeks ago the tide was running against President Reagan's Central American policy because Capitol Hill was in an uproar over the mining of Nicaraguan harbors. Last week, the tide turned. The harbor mining was barely mentioned in Congress and the President won a tight but important legislative vote authorizing more military aid to El Salvador. The shift reflected not only Washington's quixotic moods on Central America, but also the perpetual tug-of-war in the post-Vietnam era over any foreign policy that involves a conspicuous use of force. Congress had cooled off during its Easter recess as the headlines concentrated on President Reagan's trip to China. And the President, in a nationally televised appeal Wednesday night, made the dire prediction that ''the Communists will succeed'' in El Salvador unless Congress voted more aid. To Democrats, that sounded like an election-year warning that he would hold them harshly to account if the Salvadoran Government fell. In fact, officials said the President had toned down earlier speech drafts, which accused his critics of being as blind toward the Communist threat as some Europeans had been to Hitler in the 1930's. He dropped a defiant reference to the harbor mining after Senate Republican leaders said it would rekindle partisan passions.

The Book Review asked 16 authors of fiction, age 40 or younger, to name the writer or writers who have most affected their work and to explain how. Here are their replies. Ann Beattie Author of ''The Burning House,'' a collection of short stories. This is a hard question to answer; at the risk of seeming to flatter myself, I don't think I write like any other writer. I started writing seriously when I was in graduate school studying literature. In those days, the only modern writer I recall thinking a lot about was Samuel Beckett. I'd always been attached to certain works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. In the late 1960's, I started reading contemporary fiction. I much admired John Updike. (While I'm flattered by comparisons critics now make between our work, he's accomplished more than I could manage; I could never be so careful yet keep my stories so uncontrived.) Other writers who knocked me over (whom I met in Esquire) were Joy Williams and Raymond Carver. I suppose I learned from them that it was O.K. to write about extraordinary things buried within the mundane, to let my sense of humor show, and that if you surprised the characters, you'd surprise the reader. But we all pick up things by osmosis, and a partial list of my syllabus from the bad old days as a teaching assistant, when I was a graduate student and first began to publish, is: Andre Gide's ''Strait Is the Gate,'' William Faulkner's ''Sanctuary,'' Hunter S. Thompson's ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,'' Arthur Bremer's ''Assassin's Diary,'' Hemingway's ''Nick Adams Stories.''

ATHOUGH tenants of multifamily buildings never have liked the idea, they are required by law to allow inspections of their apartments and to give a key to the person or entity responsible for the building. In a rental building, the responsible person is the landlord, his superintendent or his agent; in a cooperative or condominium, it is a board officer, the manager or the board's agent. The law is regarded as particularly irksome, professionals are finding, in rental buildings that are being converted. ''It's a very touchy problem,'' said Helen Mettler, a lawyer and board member of an Upper East Side co-op. ''The shareholders feel that they own their apartments, and who are you to insist on snooping around?''

Mayor Koch plans to hire more than 100 additional social workers within the next year to handle child-abuse cases, according to senior city officials. Mr. Koch's action was influenced by a recent inspector general's report that found serious shortcomings in the way the Office of Special Services for Children, the city's child welfare agency, dealt with 17 abuse cases in which nine Brooklyn children died, Deputy Mayor Stanley Brezenoff said. The report, made late last month by L. Priscilla Hall, the inspector general of the City Human Resources Administration, was the third official study in the last year to fault the city's handling of child-abuse cases. ''I think we all would say that the inspector general's investigation opened our eyes wider,'' said Mr. Brezenoff, who has been assigned to improve performance. ''The Mayor told me to push this review so measures can be taken as quickly as possible.''

THROUGH the years, the Olympic Games have been idealized, perhaps to the point of unreality. Indeed, once they were primarily for the athletes, and politics were relatively minor. But more and more, consideration for the athletes has become secondary to consideration of politics. In recent days, this summer's Games of the XXIII Olympiad in Los Angeles have been shaken by the declaration of the Soviet Union and several other Eastern-bloc nations that they will not compete. The defections raise several questions: - How did the Olympic Games get to this point?

For the final 14 miles, she ran alone through the surrounding countryside and suburban neighborhoods of the quaint state capital, often framed against the lush green of a Washington springtime and the backdrop of the Olympic Mountains. Joan Benoit ran with fluid strides and a blank expression, as if purposely trying to deny the anticipation that was building as each step brought her closer to a most-memorable victory. But when she crossed the finish line in 2 hours 31 minutes 4 seconds to win the first United States women's Olympic marathon trial today, Miss Benoit's hands covered that impassive face and she began to sob. She shook her head, as if in disbelief, and her legs became the least bit unsteady. A historic day in women's sports had become an eventful one as well.

Among the friends of Walter F. Mondale, nothing arouses as much anxiety as the suggestion that the former Vice President can do everything required of a Presidential nominee except expand his appeal outside hardcore Democrats. Mr. Mondale had just about laid the ''electability'' question to rest by making the most significant comeback from an early reversal by any recent Democratic candidate. Last week, by narrowly losing the Ohio and Indiana primaries to Gary Hart, he gave new life to the old doubts just as he gave new life to Mr. Hart's candidacy. Few Historical Guideposts Moreover, the nomination battle has now entered territory for which there are few historical guideposts. The anomaly is that the Colorado Senator now has a longshot chance at the nomination, even though it is almost a numerical impossibility for him to overtake Mr. Mondale's lead in the delegate count. Of the 1,967 delegate votes needed to nominate, Mr. Mondale's tally last week, according to United Press International, was 1,518, and Mr. Hart's, 886; 829 remain to be selected. Among party leaders, there was grumbling that Mr. Mondale had blown an opportunity to cinch the nomination by falling victim to his old nemeses, caution and overconfidence. He was particularly faulted for campaigning down to the wire in Texas, leaving Ohio to Mr. Hart for a couple of days. ''We made a series of decisions that with 20/20 hindsight we might not have made,'' said James A. Johnson, the Mondale campaign chairman.

Contrary to what is often supposed, an artist's professional activity is not the stuff of drama. Michelangelo tucked up under the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel may well have been a remarkable sight. To see Jackson Pollock pour paint on canvas, as happens in Hans Namuth's famous documentary movie, is to understand him better. But in the case of almost every other artist, from Giotto down to our own day, there was in theatrical terms no action at all. One man with a sketchbook on his knee is much like another. Great art is not made with histrionic gestures. It is made slowly and in silence with movements of the hand and arm that are more likely to remind us of a watchmaker than of an orchestra conductor at grips with Mahler's Eighth. This is not a procedure that can be acted out. For this and other reasons I was amazed when I first heard that Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine were working on a musical about Georges Seurat and the great painting of his - now in the Chicago Art Institute - that is called ''Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grande Jatte.''

LOS ANGELES THERE was all the excitement of a bygone Hollywood for last week's debut of Tri-Star Pictures' first production, ''The Natural,'' starring Robert Redford. The movie, shown at a gala premiere in New York and at a by-invitation-only screening here, is about a baseball hitter blessed with mythic power and cursed with bad luck - one who, invariably, either smashes the ball into the bleachers for a home run or strikes out miserably. It's not a bad metaphor for Hollywood. Indeed, given the vagaries of the movie business, both Tri-Star and its film could meet either fate. But whatever the weekend box office, Tri- Star is determined to a become a force - an ''instant major,'' company executives call it - in the movie industry. A major, in the Hollywood lexicon, is a company that distributes upwards of 15 movies each year, some that it has produced itself, others ''picked up'' from producers elsewhere. By most counts, there are only six majors left today: Columbia, MGM-UA, Paramount, Warner Brothers, 20th Century-Fox and Universal (Walt Disney Pictures' production has dropped too low). And the odds against Tri-Star making a seventh are daunting. Not since 1924, with the formation of Columbia Pictures, has any company succeeded in becoming a major.