Her man, Soviet style

Somehow we've always thought of him as Ivan, the average Soviet citizen looking like Andrei Gromyko in shirtsleeves. Now we have to adjust to Alexander Kuznetsov, the John Smith sort of name given to the Soviet man of 1982 in a Times of London report about a composite portrait produced by Moscow statisticians.

This gentleman is a little more than five feet seven inches tall. He is probably not an ''ordinary practical worker'' but a researcher ''with a creative attitude toward production.'' He works slightly less than 40 hours a week and has 22 working days of paid vacation a year. He pays 3 percent of his income to rent a ''well-equipped two-room flat.''

What with evening studies to advance his education, plus reading more than 20 books a year and several newspapers a day, Kuznetsov has time for no more than about an hour and a half a day for radio or television.

Oh, yeah?

This is where a spot survey of Soviet women took issue with the statistics. They only wished their men spent so little time before the tube and so much improving themselves. They questioned the omission of Mr. Average's consumption of alcohol.

To which we might add a few questions in the vein of Western pollsters: Does Alexander Kuznetsov consider unemployment worse than inflation, high interest rates, environmentalists, or none of the above? Does he favor a nuclear freeze, arms control, or whatever policy suits those ''who know more about these things than I do''? Is he for banning video games, Walkman headsets, or music in elevators? Is he planning to buy a car before the end of the fiscal year? Does he have a dog?

Perhaps Soviet women would take Moscow statistics on such matters no more seriously than those on how hard Alexander works. But they could fool us.