EUROPE : Learning Joys of Capitalism--in Moscow : Vietnamese sent to Russia to build socialism have picked up the art of trading instead.

Cao The Hien should be briskly ironing fabric in the Stormy Petrel Shoe Factory, learning a solid proletarian trade and earning money to help build socialism back home.

But the 35-year-old assembly-line worker from Vietnam performs his task lackadaisically, preferring to conserve energy for his unofficial, after-hours job--hawking T-shirts at an outdoor flea market.

“I’m in Moscow to earn money,” Cao said, ignoring the manager who scolded him for slacking, “and I’ll earn it any way I can.”

Like thousands of Vietnamese “guest workers” brought to the former Soviet Union to fill menial jobs, Cao has found life here surprisingly cushy--and rich with opportunities to indulge in a little wildcat capitalism.

Yet his good life may be about to end.

Pressure from two increasingly vocal poles of Russian society--the unemployed poor and the self-made rich--has forced the government to cancel the 11-year-old guest worker program, which at its peak employed 90,000 temporary Vietnamese immigrants.

President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government last month recommended that enterprises where an estimated 28,000 Vietnamese still work terminate the four- or six-year contracts and ship their “guests” home en masse.

“Our businessmen don’t like the Vietnamese because they buy cheap clothes in Thailand and Hong Kong and undercut Russian traders,” said Vadim Serafimov, a Russian Foreign Ministry specialist on Asia. “And I can’t exclude the possibility that some managers may lay off Russian workers and hire Vietnamese for lower wages.”

When the fraternal Communist nations of the Soviet Union and Vietnam signed the guest worker agreement in 1981, Moscow desperately needed imported toilers who would take the back-breaking, low-paying jobs that locals shunned. But now, with massive unemployment looming, Russians are taking a second look at assembly-line drudgery and textile piecework.

“We have plenty of unemployed Russians who could take over the jobs of the Vietnamese,” said Svetlana Ivanova, floor manager of the shoe factory where Cao puts in eight hours a day before heading to the market.

Typically, Ivanova says, Cao and his fellow Vietnamese make her “jealous and angry.” Rather than stick to their factory jobs, she says, the Asians are bent on making money through trade.

“They come to Russia just to do business, and that annoys us. We all realize they’re more interested in selling clothes than in working at real jobs,” Ivanova said.

The Asian newcomers’ gift for commerce, both legal and illegal, is celebrated. In Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, tea kettles had to be taken off the market because local Vietnamese would snatch them up, tag on a hefty markup and resell them. And in Siberia, police recently seized 50 huge containers filled with aluminum, copper wire and medicines that Vietnamese who were laid off by Far East factories hoped to smuggle home.

In the bustling markets that now flourish in Russian cities from Murmansk to Magadan, a sharp businessman selling Asian-made clothing can earn up to $30 in a single afternoon--the equivalent of an entire month’s salary.

Despite their relative wealth, the Vietnamese cling to their factory jobs because they guarantee them working papers and the right to reside here temporarily. Dutifully, they send Hanoi the 10% cut of their official wages that the Socialist Republic of Vietnam demands for “building socialism.”

Some guest workers say they would like to stay in Russia after their contracts expire, rather than endure the Marxist privations and discipline of their homeland.

“I don’t know what I’ll do when I go back to Vietnam,” Pham Tong Nhai, 29, said as customers picked through her pile of flimsy gray jackets. “Without trading, life will be so boring.”