A Soviet woman has been admitted as a transfer student to the Class of 1991, marking the first time in more than 40 years that a citizen of the USSR has entered Harvard as a degree candidate, the woman said yesterday.

Natalya Tsarkova, a native of Riga in the USSR, said in a telephone interview that she had received a letter of acceptance from the University and that she will arrive in Cambridge late in August.

Admissions officials would neither confirm nor deny Tsarkova's acceptance, saying they could not comment on individual applicants. But B. Michael Rinella, a 1985 Kennedy School of Government graduate who helped Tsarkova apply, said admissions department representatives had told him that Tsarkova had been accepted.

Tsarkova said she will enter Harvard as a junior and continue her studies in computer science. But she added that she viewed her acceptance to the University as an opportunity to expand her academic horizons.

"At home, I'm getting an education that is very professional, very narrow," she said. "That's why I'm very unsatisfied, because computer science is only one of the things I wanted to study."

The daughter of two Soviet mathematicians, Tsarkova, 19, is currently a student at Latvia State University. She said she decided to apply to Harvard on the advice of Rinella, who travelled to the Soviet Union on a Harvard-sponsored trip last spring.

Rinella said that he was intrigued by the young Soviet and offered to help her apply to Harvard when he learned of her interest in studying in the U.S.

"Natalya just had an opinion on everything--you know, `I think this, or I think that,'" Rinella said. "She's a very spirited young woman."

Both Associate Registrar Thurston A. Smith and Director of Admissions Marilyn M. Lewis '70 said no Soviet citizen had been accepted to the College in recent memory, and Smith added that it was possible that no Soviet nationals had ever been enrolled at Harvard.

And Marshall I. Goldman, associate director of the Russian Research Center, said that Tsarkova would become the first Soviet citizen to enroll in a regular degree program at Harvard since at least the end of World War II.

"At other universities it's a regular thing now," Goldman said.

Nonetheless, it is a highly select group of Soviets who study in the U.S. In the academic year 1987-88, there were only 77 Soviet citizens enrolled in American universities as regular students, a figure which includes both undergraduate and graduate programs, according to the New York-based Institute of International Education.

During that same year, more than 29,000 students from the People's Republic ofChina entered American schools, according to theinstitute.

But Tsarkova said that Soviet authorities gaveher little difficulty when she began to apply toHarvard--although the state Ministry of Educationexpressed some skepticism when she told them ofher plans.

"They though it was impossible, but theycouldn't reject me," she said

She credited Soviet leader Mikhail S.Gorbachev's ongoing restructuring of the Sovietstate--generally referred to as "perestroika"--asenabling her to realize the previouslyunattainable goal of attending Harvard.

"It was like a dream, something I had alwaysheard about," she said. "[Harvard] was one ofthose big words that you've heard about and younever knew how to use.