Soviets Flock West to Poland, Eager to Wheel and Deal : East Europe: Growing numbers cross the border to trade cheap domestic goods for hard currency and Western electronics.

It is not easy to conceive of this city as “the Paris of the East,” but if you come from Byelorussia, the Ukraine or the lumpen suburbs of Moscow, Riga or Vilnius, the old Polish capital beckons with a distinct glitter.

True, the sparkle is more that of the Klondike in the Gold Rush than of the City of Light. But the allure is genuine to hundreds of thousands of Soviets flocking to Poland to trade cheap Soviet goods for hard currency and Western electronics, packing adventure and tidy profits into every trip.

With newly liberalized travel regulations, Soviets from virtually every far-flung republic have made their way in growing numbers across the Polish border. The huge lines of Soviets waiting to pass through their own country’s border controls often mean a four-day roadside bivouac.

But once the Soviets are on the Polish side, the Polish customs officers wave them past with little bother, sending them on to market encampments all over the country, cutting deals and slashing prices as they go.

In addition, there are an increasing number of Soviet “guest workers” arriving every week. Now that the winter has ended and the construction season has begun, unskilled workers are coming by the thousands from the Soviet Union’s poorest regions--the Ukraine and Byelorussia in particular. They are being hired at wages that are half those usually paid to Poles.

Some of the traders and workers come by the busload in organized “tourist” groups. Others pack a change of clothes, a blanket and as much merchandise as they can squeeze into their tiny Lada cars and head west, traveling slowly on overloaded and sagging springs, sleeping in their cars and eating their sausages by the roadside.

The trips can be rugged, but worth it.

“For this kind of money, you don’t mind working,” said Viktor Popov, 30, who lives near Riga, Latvia, and was making his 15th trip to Warsaw. “For one trip like this, three or four days, I can earn (the equivalent of $2,000). That’s a year’s salary in Latvia.”

Popov and a colleague from Riga were waiting in line with about 100 other Soviets and Poles in a court building in central Warsaw to get a notarized stamp on an invitation to return to Poland as a “tourist,” a formality still required by the Polish authorities.

Hundreds of Poles have managed to earn money off the government’s requirement for an invitation, selling their signatures happily for prices ranging from the equivalent of $5 to $10 an application.

“I never give out less than 200 forms a day,” said Dariusz Barkowski, who runs the kiosk that sells, for a few cents, the invitation forms. “There are at least 40 private notary offices in Warsaw,” he went on, “and about 30 state-run notaries. If they’re all doing as much as I am, that is a lot of Russians.”

That admittedly rough estimate works out to about 14,000 a day, and that’s only Warsaw.

Market squares all across Poland, in country villages and in large industrial cities, are packed with Soviet traders, their experience on the circuit evident in their merchandise and the way it is displayed.

Beginners start with a few items on towels or blankets spread out on bare ground or asphalt. They sell kitchen knives, flashlight batteries, combs, small toys, perhaps a bottle of perfume or a few bars of soap.

To most Poles--whose own countrymen have been doing the same thing for years in Yugoslavia and Austria and on the streets of Berlin--there is an instant sympathy for the Soviets, even though Poles do not necessarily count the Soviets among their favorite neighbors.

But the enmity has more to do with political history than personality, and the Poles can identify with the economic plight of their huge neighbor to the east.

In Poland, “you start with small things,” said Viktor Sawicki, a Latvian of Polish ancestry who knows the trading business well. “From the little things, you get bigger things.”

The biggest, most conspicuous Soviet marketplace is the huge parking lot surrounding the Palace of Culture in the center of Warsaw. It is a skyscraper of Stalinist-Gothic design, actually a “gift” of the Soviet dictator to the Polish people and roundly despised by most of the citizenry--who find it deliciously ironic that Soviets now employ it as a huge flea market.

From handfuls of items spread on folded blankets, traders might then move to aluminum-framed folding cots, selling bedroom slippers, socks, a few shirts or sweaters. On the next trip, they will have advanced to folding tables, with electric mixers or portable television sets. As Sawicki said, a good return can be made on “anything that plugs into the wall.”

Latvians, relatively prosperous by the standards of the Ukraine or Byelorussia, often carry home Western electronic gear, such as hi-fi sets and videotape recorders. Other traders prefer smuggling hard currency to exchange on the black market. Thus armed with black-market rubles, they buy more Soviet-made goods and prepare for another journey to Poland.

Sawicki, after his own modest start, now operates four minivans, hauling groups interested in what he calls “artistic exchange” between Riga and Warsaw.

“There are many people of Polish extraction in Latvia,” Sawicki said. “Our idea is to bring people closer to their cultural homeland.”

If, in the process, they would like to sell a couple of Latvian-built electric drills or three or four sewing machines, that’s fine, he said. “We’re interested in business exchanges too.”