COLUMN ONE : Relics of a Utopian Journey : Thousands of Americans moved to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ‘30s in pursuit of a more just society. A few remain, but their dreams were shattered long ago.

Back in the Great Depression, in the days when communism was a gleaming red star that beckoned working-class dreamers from across the sea, 24-year-old Rose Kostyuk packed her bags and moved to Russia.

It was an exciting adventure for a spunky young social worker from Philadelphia. Thousands of miles away, the first real socialist state was being hammered together. Idealists everywhere felt a magnetic pull toward this utopian land of Lenin. All the possibilities of a lifetime lay ahead. The year was 1932.

And then came reality. Kostyuk fell in love with a Russian Communist and left her American husband. She married the Russian and had children. But all around, the workers’ paradise was sinking into a world of terror and paranoia. Finally, there was no escape.

America--safe, familiar, rich America--drifted as far away as a childhood memory.

“Why I survived, I don’t know,” Kostyuk, now white-haired and in a wheelchair, tells a visitor to her log cabin home in this rustic community north of Moscow. “Can you explain it?”

They journeyed from the United States to the Soviet Union by the thousands in the 1920s and early ‘30s, an assortment of political radicals, Depression refugees and restless spirits, enchanted by the promise of a society more just than the one they were leaving behind.

Some brought modern machinery. Union members packed their hand tools. Others lugged little besides idealism. Those with Eastern European roots felt as if they were going home. And for a brief, now forgotten interlude, these pilgrims were welcomed, several thousand in all, scholars estimate.

But the season of goodwill was fleeting: By the late 1930s, those Westerners remaining had become a people displaced, often shunned by Soviet neighbors and co-workers, feared as subversives, in some cases jailed or even executed.

A few of the wanderers and their children survive in the old Soviet Union to this day, having outlived the country that proved a false utopia. Their personal tales are remarkable and often troubled--stories of tragedy in the severe Russian landscape, of noble fantasies and brutal letdowns, of innocent choices with heart-breaking consequences.

“He died in 1946, his last words about me and my children,” Kostyuk wrote recently of her father, a druggist, who once cautioned her about expecting too much from human nature. Even now, “I cannot put these words on paper without tears.”

Although a few of the Americans have clung to the goals of their youth, a larger number acknowledge lives of cruel disappointment. The atrocities of Josef Stalin’s regime and the corruption that became epidemic are widely seen as a betrayal. Today’s messy, final collapse of the Soviet Union comes almost as an anticlimax.

“I think a lot would agree that the dream was a fantasy, that their lives were lived in vain,” said Paula Garb, a researcher at UC Irvine and a former Soviet resident, who chronicled their experiences in her 1987 book, “They Came to Stay.”

Benjamin Leib, a weaver from northern New Jersey, was one of the many who came to stay in the land of Lenin. As a young man, he had moved to the United States from Poland but never found the home he was looking for. He was jailed for organizing a strike at a textile factory in Paterson, and his Communist labor activities landed him on an employers’ blacklist.

Out of work in the Depression year of 1933, he sought refuge in the Soviet Union. His sad odyssey, and that of his family, illustrate the hardships that befell many of the emigres.

His son, Gary, who left grade school in New Jersey to make the long-ago trip, still recalls his father’s disappointment in the Soviet Union; how the hard, lonely life in the “workers’ country” contrasted with the excitement of New Jersey’s radical labor movement.

“In America, he was a leader,” said Gary Leib, now 70, a friendly, balding man with twinkling eyes who lives half an hour from the center of Moscow. “A lot of people wanted to be with us. Here, he went to work and went home, went to work and went home. People weren’t interested in politics. They were afraid. You say the wrong thing, and they take you away.”

Ultimately, the hardships of Soviet life proved overwhelming. Benjamin Leib died of starvation during World War II. In the 1950s, when Soviet authorities imposed a mass crackdown on foreigners, his daughter--Gary’s sister--was arrested and held in a northern town for a year.

“Someone squealed that she was going around with the wrong people,” Gary Leib said of the trumped-up charge.

Extra attention from the KGB wasn’t the only danger for an “Amerikanka,” a term for these foreigners from the United States. Life was perilous enough for ordinary Soviets living under a dictatorship. Gary Leib, who mastered Russian and graduated from Soviet schools, believes that being American-born and Jewish added up to a double whammy. It made it harder to get accepted to college, blocked him from becoming a military officer and later cost him jobs teaching English and working in a research institute.

Comforts came in personal life, in his Soviet family and his love of music. To this day, he needs little encouragement to pick up his accordion or sit at the piano and play the bittersweet Russian melodies he has composed over the years.

“The ideals were good,” said Leib, a widower, who supports himself by translating English science books into Russian. “But they didn’t work.”

Many of the Americans--perhaps half, researcher Garb estimates--had left the Soviet Union by the mid-1930s, either disenchanted with the hardships or frightened away by Stalin. Those who stayed, especially if they had become Soviet citizens, were more or less marooned after about 1937, when authorities made it much harder to leave.

Some remained true believers. To Sally Laakso, it was the “reforms” of the 1980s that came as a betrayal, not the brutalities of the past. Even now, her 75-year-old eyes light up when she speaks of V.I. Lenin, the Soviet apostle, or harks back to the lofty spirit of workers in a bygone era. They were people like her father, who brought his family to the Soviet community of Karelia six decades ago.

There, near the border with Finland, he joined in efforts to build up the local lumber-based economy.

“Conditions were very primitive,” Laakso recalled in her Moscow apartment, decorated with wood carvings made by her husband of 55 years. “But everyone was enthusiastic, because we were told: ‘You are going to help build socialism.’ ”

The compact dwelling, across the way from a Russian militia station, is a world apart from the United States of her childhood, where she sang in the school choir and wrote for the school paper.

Her father, a floor layer who had come to America from Finland, was harassed by the FBI for his efforts to organize workers, as she remembers it, first in Michigan and later in New Jersey. Finally, “My father thought it best to move to the Soviet Union,” said Laakso, who keeps fit with a regimen of swimming and ice skating. “At least we wouldn’t be persecuted for socialist views.”

But like many of the other foreigners, the family walked straight into a buzz saw of misfortune.

Just two months after arriving in Karelia, her father--”a husky, heavyweight wrestler”--was riding in a boat loaded with lumber when a storm struck. The boat capsized and he drowned.

Later, Laakso would survive the German bombs that exploded around her train as she fled Moscow during World War II with her children. But after they packed into a small home in Alma-Ata in Central Asia, tragedy returned: her infant son, her sister and the sister’s children all died of tuberculosis. Her brother, serving with Soviet army intelligence, was captured and executed by the Finns.

Laakso survived as a teacher and translator, once dubbing the Russian for the 1938 Tyrone Power movie, “In Old Chicago.” How could she endure it all? “Everyone was brothers,” she explains. “Everyone was helping each other out. That’s why we were able to withstand the famine and everything else.”

Now she watches with dismay, even rage, as the ideals of socialism are roundly bashed, as people propose removing Lenin--”a leader of the world”--from his famous tomb in Red Square. Indeed, new insults to a revered past seem to crop up every day: the relentless spread of American pop culture, once-proud leaders who now “dance to the tune” of George Bush and the CIA.

“Now that everything is being destroyed, it’s the biggest mistake that could ever be done!” she cries.

To understand her fury, it helps to recall the America that Sally Laakso left behind, a place where a squalid poorhouse awaited the needy, where divisions of class and race were vast, where there wasn’t even Social Security. By contrast, the fledgling Soviet Union seemed to promise something fairer. Full employment, universal health care and retirement aid all were guaranteed.

After her father drowned, for example, Sally and her brother received state grants, and their mother, who suffered from arthritis, survived on a steady disability check.

On top of that, Soviet rhetoric depicted a place where people of different races and religions pulled together as comrades for the common good. In America, racial segregation remained deeply entrenched and often was enforced by law.

Many of the early Western witnesses--those who returned to the United States by the mid-1930s--were favorably moved by the grand experiment. “Most of them, it seemed to me, spoke with great fervor” about their experience, “of having experienced something emotionally and intellectually quite unusual,” said Stephen Kotkin, a Princeton University historian and expert on 20th-Century Russia.

Yet those who stayed for the long haul often became alienated. Robert Robinson, a toolmaker from Detroit, hoped that as a black American, he would get a fairer shake in Soviet society than he had at home. Gradually, however, he concluded that popular attitudes did not live up to official speeches.

“No matter what my Russian neighbors told me, regardless of how much Communist officials bragged about their system of social justice and the equality of people, I was never really accepted as an equal,” he wrote in his biography, “Black on Red.”

Still, Robinson, who finally got permission to leave Russia after 44 years, felt he was luckier than some of the other black Americans he had encountered. “The fortunate ones were exiled to Siberian labor camps. Those less fortunate were shot.”

But perhaps no one’s journey through the Soviet Union was more tumultuous than that of Rose Kostyuk, a mixture of high ideals and caprice that quickly collided with dark Soviet reality.

The young woman had left Philadelphia with her first husband, an unemployed lawyer. Within two years, she was aboard a train thick with cigarette smoke and the smell of frying food, bound for a state farm in Central Asia with her new husband, a Russian Communist.

Images of her life near the Afghan border in Uzbekistan still flash like a kaleidoscope: Pristine meadows alive with red poppies, herds of sheep on parched hillsides, her husband, Vasya, “a village boy from Minsk,” mounting a horse at daybreak and riding off to inspect the cotton fields.

Summer afternoons got so hot that they would wrap themselves in wet sheets and cover the windows of their hut with blankets. They started a family, and Rose kept busy tending the two children. But danger soon crept into their romantic oasis. Vasya’s standing in the Communist Party plunged, maybe for defending a member who was out of favor, maybe for having an American wife.

Rose felt guilty for whatever part she played. In a fateful if ill-conceived gesture, she became a Soviet citizen and gave up her U.S. passport. Later she would explain her profound sacrifice: “I felt sorry for the poor goof who had jeopardized his career by linking his life with a foreigner. . . . If he had been a wiser man and less of a Don Quixote, he wouldn’t have done such a reckless thing.”

Vasya was thrown out of the party anyway and tipped off that his arrest was imminent.

Rose and the two children fled to Moscow, where she ended up in a peasants’ hostel, being disinfected along with several Gypsy women in the shower room. The children were led off to a separate ward.

Her next stop was the feared office of the NKVD security service, predecessor to the KGB:

“I stood in line with all the wives of arrested people and said, ‘Here I am. What do you want with me and my husband?’ I remember the man was very annoyed with me. He said, ‘We’ll come for you when we want you. Now get out.’ ”

For some reason, Vasya wasn’t hauled away, nor did the police come after Rose. In fact, he was allowed back into the party, along with many others, during a brief lull in Stalin’s terror. Still, he cut his ties to Central Asia, and the family settled in Tomilino, the rustic colony near Moscow where Rose lives to this day.

Through all the years of stupid, baffling injustices, she tried to hold steady to her dream of a better world: “We endured things that we couldn’t understand,” she says now. “Sometimes my husband and I would put a blanket over our mouths at night and say, ‘This isn’t the way things should be going.’ But we didn’t say it loud.”

Beyond the political horrors was the lingering ache of feeling not quite welcome. Rose remembers returning from the Ural Mountains after World War II to a ransacked home: 42 Harvard Classic books that her father shipped from America had been taken, along with her homespun Ukrainian carpets, even the wiring from the walls.

Later she dropped in on her next-door neighbor, she recalled, “and there was my meat grinder on the table.”

Worst of all, perhaps, was the forced separation from family. Soviet travel restrictions applied to everybody, yet they had special meaning for those with relatives outside the country.

The feeling is captured in a yellowed copy of a letter she wrote in December, 1945, after a rare telephone conversation with her family: “For three days I haven’t been where I am. I’ve been with you, waking up in the middle of the night with your voices in my ears again, trying to see you in my mind’s eye, talking to you again.

“The business of permission to visit is a ticklish one. It takes at least six to eight months to get a decision. But I must see it through. I must recapture my old fightin’ spirit. If only this once.”

The request was turned down and she never saw her father again. Looking back, the postwar years run together, a dreary period of stress and worry in contrast to her colorful, earlier adventures.

Finally, after 33 years in the Soviet Union, 20 of them awaiting permission to travel abroad, after impassioned letters to Stalin and Nikita S. Khrushchev, she got the OK to go--by herself--to the United States. Stepping off a KLM jetliner in 1965, Rose entered a world transformed from the Depression years: Her working-class friends and relatives now lived in middle-class splendor right out of Ladies Home Journal.

There followed many joyful reunions and smaller pleasures, such as eating oysters, lobster and “real Italian spaghetti” after decades of potatoes, cabbage and other basic Soviet fare.

But, if Russia had proven far from an ideal home, the United States no longer felt quite right either. “I just didn’t have the guts or imagination to picture all of us Kostyuks adjusting in this new world,” she later wrote in her memoirs. “Besides, they were waiting for me to come back to them.”

Gary Leib made his own return trip to New York, Boston and Cleveland last April after an absence of almost 60 years. His impressions included “friendly” New York drivers, compared to their wild Moscow counterparts, the taste of pineapple and other forgotten foods--overall, a place that has everything.

“If I were five years younger, I’d leave (the Soviet Union for good),” he declares. “Even now I contemplate it.”

Sally Laakso has also traveled abroad in recent years, to the United States in 1981 and to see relatives in Finland. But she feels at home in Moscow. What’s alienating is “all this slinging mud at everything that has been sacred to us.”

If the pilgrims have suffered more than their share of disappointments, however, few have lost fondness for the high-minded principles that propelled their journeys.

Six thousand miles from Los Angeles, Rose Kostyuk is sitting at a small table in her home of 50 years, offering a guest a piece of honey cake and cup of hot tea. Outside the window, a postcard scene unfolds: the first snowflakes of the season--great, wet flakes--are parachuting onto the golden leaves that cover the yard.

She remains bright and alert these days, stays up “half the night” reading. She is slowed only by a fall that put her in the wheelchair last year. She shares the cabin with her daughter and her grandson’s family. Husband Vasya died 10 years ago.

“The meaning of life always occupied more than what I was doing with my own life,” she muses. “Now I’m hard put to understand the meaning of things in my own country, the country I made my own.”

As the snowflakes pile up on the window ledge and a newborn great-grandchild cries in the bedroom, she offers a parting thought. It’s a memorial, really, to a tortured land--and to all the idealistic seekers who gave up everything for it once upon a time: “It’s such a simple dream,” she said. “Why should it not be possible?”