YEREVAN, U.S.S.R.--Survivors of the Armenian earthquake are freezing to death at night because only a fraction of the thousands of tents sent to the disaster area reach the homeless, a Soviet newspaper reported yesterday.

Rescuers struggled to haul heavy equipment into the disaster area and evacuate victims, despite roads jammed with grieving relatives, a mountain snowstorm and temperatures that dropped below zero Fahrenheit.

The Foreign Ministry today put the official death toll from the Dec. 7 quake at 55,000 and the number of injured to 13,000.

A top official said the estimated cost of rebuilding will be at least 5 billion rubles ($8 billion).

Hope dwindled for those trapped in the ruins, and the smell of decaying corpses filled the air. Rescuers have pulled 18,500 people from the wreckage in the past four days, but only 5 400 people were alive, Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov told reporters today in Moscow.

Newspaper accounts made it clear that despite the outpouring of international and, Armenians were suffering from lack of shelter and medical care.

"In the corridor of a hospital, a man ran about, clutching the tiny body of a child to his breast, crying, 'Please, help me!'" said the newspaper Socialisticheska Industria, in an article that also told how doctors were pressed into service building temporary housing.

The Communist youth newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said 60,000 tents have been sent to the disaster area, but most of the 500,000 homeless are shivering around bonfires in the ruins.

A worldwide outpouring of aid has overwhelmed the backward, mountainous region hit hardest by the Armenian earthquake, clogging Yerevan's airport and the two crude highways that link it with the devastation.

Cars, trucks, buses and cranes creep slowly day and night up the narrow, winding roads across the Caucasus range to the stricken area about 50 miles away. The sound of honking horns and grinding engines breaks the mournful silence of stricken villages and cities.

Foreign aircraft bringing in blood, medical supplies, food, clothing and rescue equipment wait hours to be unloaded at the airport in Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia.

Two relief planes have crashed, killing more than 80 people, and minor collisions have been reported among the throng of aircraft that stacked up over the weekend.

"It's been unavoidably chaotic, with so many aircraft arriving at once," said Colin Wheeler, an engineer with Air Europe, which flew 20 tons of medical equipment and food into Yerevan on Monday.

He said one of the airline's Boeing 707s was clipped by a taxiing Aeroflot jet on Sunday but was not seriously damaged.

Ground crews scurry among the mass of parked aircraft with the few rolling stairways available.

French and German teams who arrived with search dogs Saturday said they had to wait an hour to get off their planes and four to five hours for their donated cargo to be unloaded.

Crates of supplies flown in by more than 40 foreign aircraft were stacked around the airport tarmac waiting for trucks, buses and helicopters to take them to stricken areas.

Air traffic controllers spoke politely in broken English to foreign air crews, then broke into heated shouting with fellow Armenians, all taxed to the breaking point by overwork and personal tragedy.

"Our nation is so undeveloped we can't even receive help properly," lamented an exhausted dispatcher on the verge of tears. She said she had been working for three days, relieved for only a few hours to sleep in a nearby office while other exhausted workers took her place.

Refugees from the earthquake area cluster 10 deep around the information desk of Aeroflot, the Soviet airline.