FRIENDSHIP FLIGHT: Tony Circles the Globe : Siberia Anything but Cold Toward Aviator

Tony Aliengena came within one stop of the Soviet Pacific on Saturday, arriving in this Siberian river-port city after traveling more than 4,000 miles from Moscow this week.

It was a week in which many of the Americans’ stereotypes about Siberia being a cold, forbidding place were dispelled as the 11-year-old from San Juan Capistrano and his entourage threaded their way across this sparsely settled region of the Soviet Union on the round-the-world flight.

Instead of cold, the Americans found sweltering heat in the first two Siberian stops of Tumen and Omsk. They also discovered Siberian mosquitoes, which grow to immense size.

And instead of finding a frozen wasteland, as many American movies suggest, the Americans have encountered a wonderland of deep forests, called taiga.

The Siberian people--who are characterized as hardened criminals, even by fellow Soviets in larger cities--have showered the Americans with affection. The outpouring has been so profuse that many of the Americans in Tony’s group have felt some embarrassment.

And on a luxury boat trip in the city of Bratsk last week, for example, 13 children who traveled 1,500 miles from their homes to see Tony surrounded the seat of a Times reporter, repeatedly shook his hand and asked for autographs.

“U.S.S.R. and USA equals friends!” one of the children, 13-year-old Anara Nukenova, wrote in the reporter’s notebook.

Similar enthusiasm greeted tony’s entourage at the next stop in Mirnyi, where the Americans received the largest reception so far their 5-week-old trip around the world. Besides hundreds of adults and children standing under umbrellas on the airport tarmac, dozens more Soviet citizens leaned out of windows and stood on the rooftops of the airport terminal to see Tony land his single-engine Cessna 210 Centurion.

In each city, local tour-guide hosts have proudly pointed out such attractions as the circus in the city of Kemerovo and a hydroelectric dam near Bratsk. In Mirnyi, known as the diamond mining capital of the Soviet Union, the entourage received a tour of local diamond museum and diamond factory.

But the Soviets appeared proudest of their abundance of forests and lakes, an attribute they invariably brought up when contrasting life in Siberia with life in the urban centers of Moscow and Leningrad.

In fact, they denounced what they called the fast-paced life style in those cities and bitterly accused them of sapping Siberia’s natural resources without giving anything back.

The Soviet Union in recent years has exploited Siberia’s plentiful timber, water and mineral resources.

“The main Siberian problem is that this is an industrial area and everything is taken to go to Moscow and the west and we get nothing,” said Albert Shcherbinin, manager of an underground rock band in Kemerovo, where coal mining has stripped much of the land.

Shcherbinin said Siberians are particularly shortchanged culturally. He complained that when major foreign performers, such as Pink Floyd, tour the Soviet Union, they are never brought farther east than Moscow or Leningrad, even though fans in Kemerovo, with a population of 1.3 million, and other large Siberian cities would gladly turn out to see them.

“It is a pity for us,” he said.

Conversely, many Muscovites disdain Siberia.

“It is a terrible place,” said Aleksie Grinevich, a Moscow journalist who is accompanying Tony. “The telephones do not work, and the people are criminals.”

Grinevich was right about the quality of Siberia’s telephones. When telephoning the United States from Bratsk last week, a Times reporter had to shout to be heard over the weak, crackly lines. In Tumen, he could not get a call out at all, despite help from five Soviet citizens. It turned out that the Soviet international operator could not believe that anyone in Tumen would actually be telephoning America and refused to place the calls. “They think we are drinking,” Grinevich said in exasperation after 45 minutes of trying to place the call.

The stereotype of Siberia as a land of criminals comes from the region’s historical use as a place of exile. Although professionals abound and there are museums and institutes in every large city, Siberia’s rough-and-ready reputation is not entirely unwarranted, as evidenced by an encounter in the Hotel Omsk on Tuesday night.

In the hotel, a drunk Siberian begged Americans to help him get a visa to visit the United States where, he said, he had relatives in Los Angeles.

“Please help me. Please, please help me,” implored the man, wearing only dungarees and clutching a half-empty bottle of vodka. “I hate Siberia.”

Later that night, the man accidentally set fire to his bed in the hotel from a dropped cigarette. The fire was quickly extinguished by other hotel guests.

“It is Siberia,” said Grinevich, chuckling.

But the wild beauty of the region and the hospitality of its residents nevertheless has enraptured the Americans. Sitting on a pine log at the Angara river picnic Thursday, Gary Aliengena and his wife, Susan, said that they much preferred the isolation here to the activity of Moscow and Leningrad.