What was going on when I was born?

The Government announced today that two more Interior Ministry security officers had been ordered detained and a general suspended in connection with the abduction and slaying of a pro-Solidarity priest. At the same time, a Government spokesman said in an interview that an autopsy on the priest, the Rev. Jerzy Popieluszko, 37 years old, had confirmed that he had been murdered. The spokesman, Jerzy Urban, said that as a result of the autopsy, he expected that homicide charges would be filed within a day or so against the three Interior Ministry officers originally seized for the crime. The priest was abducted from his car in northern Poland on Oct. 19.

Violence ignited by the assassination of Indira Gandhi spread Friday, pushing the nationwide death toll close to 1,000, according to some estimates. At least 500 killings were reported in the New Delhi area alone. As this battered and fearful city prepared to receive more than 100 foreign dignitaries at Mrs. Gandhi's funeral and cremation today, her son and successor, Rajiv, was officially confirmed as Prime Minister on Friday. Applauded by Party Members To thunderous applause, members of Parliament from the governing Congress Party ratified his appointment by a party central committee. He was appointed Wednesday only hours after his mother was gunned down by assailants who have been identified by the police as two Sikh members of her security guard.

Deputy Mayor Kenneth Lipper yesterday sharply criticized the leadership of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and challenged management to set specific goals for improving the city's subway and bus service. Mr Lipper, who read from a statement approved by Mayor Koch, said the M.T.A. was relying too much on legislative changes that might never arrive. It is ''unsatisfactory for management to throw up its hands and say nothing is possible: or no responsibility can be placed on it, until extraordinary legislation is enacted,'' Mr. Lipper said. ''All government agencies and businesses must operate in imperfect worlds and are held accountable for relative performance within their own confines.''

On the eve of the funeral of Indira Gandhi, trains have been arriving at Delhi Railway Station from the countryside carrying the battered bodies of slain Sikhs. The deputy stationmaster at Delhi Railway Station said he had been told by witnesses that some of the Sikhs had been killed by gangs that boarded the trains. Other victims, he said, were apparently killed or wounded first, then thrown onto passing coaches. Since Thursday, when violence against Sikhs became widespread after Mrs. Gandhi's assassins were identified by officials as Sikhs in her security detail, at least 40 bodies have arrived, station officials said.

Seventeen years after defecting to the West, Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's only surviving child, has returned to the Soviet Union and had her citizenship restored. A brief announcement in the Government newspaper Izvestia and on Tass, the official press agency, and read on the evening television news said the Soviet authorities ''considered and complied with a request made by S. I. Alliluyeva, who has returned to Moscow, for restoring her to the citizenship of the U.S.S.R. as well as for granting Soviet citizenship to Alliluyeva's daughter Olga.'' Once Called Soviet a Prison Miss Alliluyeva, who had been living in Cambridge, England, for the last two years under the name Lana Peters, could not be immediately located in Moscow, and there was no ready explanation for her decision to return to the country she once called a prison. (Miss Alliluyeva's return left some Western acquaintances stunned and puzzled, but others who have been close to her expressed no surprise, saying she had been unhappy in the West in recent years. Page 4.)

Angola has offered to cut the number of Cuban troops in its country from 30,000 to 10,000 and to redeploy those remaining far from its southern borders if South Africa will grant independence to South-West Africa, Reagan Administration officials reported today. This falls short of the South African demand that all Cuban troops be withdrawn as part of an overall settlement designed to create an independent nation of Namibia, under United Nations auspices, out of the disputed territory of South-West Africa. But Administration officials, who have been involved in intensive mediation between Angola and South Africa, said they regarded the Angolan offer as important because it marked the first time Angola had accepted the principle that Cuban troops, who have been in Angola since 1975, would be part of an overall package agreement. Negotiator's Comment Chester A. Crocker, the Assistant Secretary of State for African affairs, who has been the principal American negotiator, refused to comment on the details of the Angolan offer. But he said later that this account is ''misleading'' and does not represent the position of the Angolan Government.

History, recent events have shown, still haunts the French. It is a brooding, sometimes baneful presence staring down the long corridor of the past at the affairs of the present day. To be accused of not knowing history, of having ''la memoire courte'' - a short memory - bears a special edge of insult here. It is an accusation, slipped not infrequently into French polemics, suggesting a lack of the moral awareness that comes from remembering past events in a country where the Revolution of 1789 still excites occasional passion.

A major two-week-old effort by Salvadoran Army units to drive leftist rebels from their strongholds north of this garrison town in Morazan Province appears to be winding down with few decisive gains for the army. Salvadoran and other Western military officials said in interviews that the sweep by 2,300 army troops had disrupted guerrilla operations, forcing the rebels to break up into small units and abandon their base camps and training schools in the mountain valleys beyond the Torola River. But the operation also cost the life of the army's best combat commander, Lieut. Col. Domingo Monterrosa, as well as three other experienced officers, who died when their helicopter crashed deep in guerrilla territory, possibly brought down by rebel machine-gunners. Plans to station army units in the area permanently appear to have stalled in the face of continuing rebel ability to harass army patrols and mass suddenly for large-scale attacks that have destroyed army units in the past.

The State Department, concerned about a potential resurgence of right-wing violence in El Salvador, has temporarily banned all but essential travel to that country by American officials, Reagan Administration aides said today. The ban, which went into effect without public notice three weeks ago, covers executive branch officials. Members of Congress and their aides, although not officially restricted, have been urged by State Department officials to cancel or postpone visits to El Salvador until next year. Two Congressional aides said they were told by the State Department this week that visits to El Salvador later this month would be unwise because of security problems. The aides said they had canceled their visits.

If I ever defect back to Moscow - no one should be surprised,'' Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote to an acquaintance in New York last Sept. 4. ''What I had confronted in this so-called Free World, was enough to kill the ideology and enthusiasm of even a strong man. I am NO strong man, and I have no 'Nerves of Steel.' Maybe you have those.'' Miss Alliluyeva's letter from London was written to Jerzy Kosinski, the Polish-born author, who met Stalin's daughter in Princeton a few years after she came to the United States in 1967. The three-page handwritten letter in English, which included two pages of postscript, hinted at her loneliness and disillusionment - a disillusionment she described at greater length in a memoir for which she had been unable to find a publisher.

The return of Stalin's 58-year-old daughter to the homeland she renounced 17 years ago left some Western acquaintances stunned and puzzled, but others who have been close to her expressed no surprise, saying she had been unhappy in the West in recent years. In rare interviews she gave and in comments to friends, there had been hints for months that Svetlana Alliluyeva had grown disillusioned with her expatriate life, which had soared to prominence after her defection, wobbled through a marriage and divorce and then settled into a kind of withdrawn quiescence in the United States and in England. ''As far as I could tell she was unhappy pretty much consistently,'' said Allan U. Schwartz, a Los Angeles lawyer specializing in literary and entertainment fields who represented Miss Alliluyeva for several years after her 1967 defection to the United States. Mr. Schwartz noted that he had not seen Miss Alliluyeva in recent years and said of her return: ''I'm surprised only because it's such a violent move. In one way I'm not surprised. She never found what she was looking for, whatever it was. She was constantly looking for some kind of attention.''

Four riot policemen were killed and 12 wounded today when a bomb destroyed their bus in the most serious of recent bombings directed at the Government of President Augusto Pinochet, police said. The remote-controlled bomb, which had been planted in a wall on a main road, sprayed the inside of the bus with glass and metal fragments, the police said. No one on the bus escaped injury.