57 REPORTED DEAD IN UZBEK VIOLENCE

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At least 57 people were killed over the weekend in clashes in the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, Soviet officials said today.

Official press organizations likened the violence to a pogrom by marauding Uzbeks against the republic's Meskhetian Turkish minority, The first descriptions of the violence, which broke out on Sunday in Fergana, depicted a frenzied scene in which crowds brandishing sticks and metal bars killed 40 Meskhetians and looted and set fire to hundreds of houses, the Uzbekistan Interior Ministry said.

The Meskhetians, a minority of 15,000 among the two million Uzbeks in the region, were exiled to the Fergana Valley in Central Asia by Stalin in 1944. Stalin evicted them from their homes along the Turkish border of Soviet Georgia to clear the area of potentially pro-Turkish people before extending his power into northeastern Turkey.

The Meskhetians have protested since then and have of late renewed their pleas to return to their homeland.

''We are scared to death even now,'' a Fergana resident, Saadat Tishabayeva, said by telephone. ''We expect it will start again any time.'' She said thousands of Soviet troops had come into the area and were frisking civilians under a state of martial law.

Television news reports from the scene tonight showed blocks of burned-out houses, frightened Meskhetians living in the countryside outside the city, dozens of young men under arrest and thousands of troops patrolling the city.

The report offered no discussion of the nationalist tensions behind the unrest and ascribed the trouble to ''anti-perestroika forces'' - in other words, to those those opposing President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's program of restructuring in Soviet life.

The violence on Sunday was among the worst reported in a series of nationalist clashes that have shaken the Kremlin since Mr. Gorbachev came to power promising a looser hand. Incident at Marketplace

The Fergana bloodshed was reportedly touched off by an incident at a marketplace that became a subject of rumor and vendetta. It soon reached citywide proportions as crowds sought out Meskhetians, beat them and set fire to their homes, official accounts said.

Abduzhabar Khusanov, a legislator from the region, said the trouble started in the marketplace in Kubasai, a valley town, on May 23 when a woman was insulted by young Meskhetians who poured a basket of strawberries on her head in a price dispute. A fight broke out, peace was restored, but ethnic vendetta simmered, he said.

An account in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, described Meskhetians fleeing mobs of Uzbeks led by young men, angry and inebriated, who at one point set fire to the regional Communist Party offices, where Meskhetians had sought sanctuary.

At least 10 Uzbeks died in the disorders, the Interior Ministry reported. The bloodshed provided new evidence to the Congress of People's Deputies of the range of simmering nationalist tensions in the Soviet Union. Congress Airs Tensions

The Government sought to have those issues vented today in the Congress of People's Deputies. Numerous grievances were aired, including the enmity between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, the Georgian grievances underlying fatal clashes in Tbilisi in April, and the assorted complaints by ethnic groups in Central Asia.

The new Supreme Soviet's Council of Nationalities, a chamber designed to give a greater voice to the nation's scores of ethnic groups, today chose Rafik N. Nishanov, party secretary of Uzbekistan, as its first chairman.

As the congress debated ethnic issues, speakers often portrayed the problem as abuse of minorities by the Russian majority. Deputies from Kazakhstan accused the Kremlin of covering up deaths inflicted by troops in 1986 in putting down an anti-Russian protest in Alma Ata.

One member of the congress, Valentin Rasputin, a Russian writer, said the complaints from Soviet republics and separatist pressure groups had reached such a pitch that the dominant Russian majority had become the target of ''Russophobia.''

''What if Russia seceded from the rest of the Soviet Union?'' he asked in a measure of the frustration with ethnic flareups. ''It would help us. We're sick and tired of being a scapegoat.''