March 28, 1981

The Soviet Union appears to be putting pressure on the Polish leaders to regain control of the situation in Poland by forceful measures - without, this time, any concessions to the Solidarity union. That is the impression gained by Western diplomats from the substance of Soviet press reports and commentaries in the week since the union charged that policemen in Bydgoszcz roughed up union activists while evicting them from an assembly hall. (In Washington, Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger said that if Moscow's efforts to curb the unrest in Poland culminated in military intervention, the Western powers would retaliate with ''concerted efforts.'' He declined to specify what responses were being considered. Page 5.)

For generations this was a town that Centralians loved. Those who left yearned for their valley and the surrounding hills, where green trees and flowers of summer hid old mining scars, and many returned to its modest but neatly painted homes, its gardens and fresh air. But now part of the town finds living here like existing on some primordial planet where the earth belches noxious gases and where the ground sometimes opens up under the tread of unwary feet. ''It was awful scary,'' said Todd Domboski, 13 years old, describing his escape last month from a 250-foot hole that had opened in his grandmother's yard and almost swallowed him. ''I just grabbed some roots and hung there; the smoke was so thick I couldn't see anything.'' He was rescued by a teen-aged cousin, but his mother, Florence, still tries to keep him calm with medication.

After a bitterly partisan debate, Senate Republicans upstaged the Democrats today by leading a successful move to restore $200 million that President Reagan had proposed cutting from the school lunch program. The funds were made available at the expense of foreign aid. Before the votes, as the Senate debated the Administration's proposed $36.4 billion reduction in the budget submitted by President Carter for the fiscal year 1982, Republicans and Democrats exchanged accusations of cruelty, indifference and exploitation concerning the poor. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has been Excerpts from debate, page 9. leading the Democratic effort to restore funds for social programs, charged the Republicans with ''taking away the crusts of bread from starving children in Africa and Southeast Asia'' in their ''pious'' attempts at fiscal austerity.

Claes Oldenburg's plan for a sculpture on the University of Hartford campus here has apparently rubbed the institution's regents the wrong way. It calls for a 23-foot-long toothbrush in red, white and blue. Although the plan would not have cost the university any money, the regents' executive committee declined to accept it by a vote of 3 to 2, with one abstention. As a result, the university will lose a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and matching contributions totaling $25,000 from private donors that would have paid for the sculpture.

In 1974, John E. Rennie, a former aircraft pilot with a history of mental illness, was questioned by Secret Service agents after he allegedly threatened to kill President Gerald R. Ford. The incident resulted in his involuntary commitment to the Ancora Psychiatric Hospital, a state institution in Hammonton, N.J. Today Mr. Rennie, who is 40 years old, is at the center of a legal battle over medication practices of psychiatrists that some experts say will have to be resolved by the United States Supreme Court. The outcome is expected to have a significant effect on the care of the 220,000 patients in the nation's mental hospitals. An emerging right of mental patients to refuse antipsychotic medication has been recognized so far by Federal courts in Massachusetts and Ohio, by the highest state courts in Colorado and Oklahoma, and, in Mr. Rennie's case, by Judge Stanley S. Brotman of the Federal District Court in Camden, N.J. Judge Brotman imposed far-reaching restrictions, which have been in effect since January 1980, on the medication practices of New Jersey's five state mental hospitals for adults. The state is asking the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, to overturn the restrictions, calling them ''complex and highly intrusive, unprecedented and unsound.''