For Russia’s Gold Diggers, the Prospects Look Good : Commerce: Under economic reforms, fiercely money-hungry miners stand to become among the most prosperous of the nation’s new capitalists.

Four decades ago, a tangle-bearded old prospector emerged from the piney Siberian woods around the frontier town of Aldan and offered a green youth of 17 the key to a fortune.

“He said he knew where there was gold and had the equipment to pan it, but he was too physically weak to do it alone,” recalled Vladimir Postoyalkin, now head of production at the sprawling Aldan Gold Mining Co.

The young Postoyalkin turned down the offer--he was too interested in girls to leave town--and never laid eyes on the prospector again. But he still sees the old man as a symbol of a unique breed of Russian. Known as starateli, which translates simply as prospectors but comes from the verb meaning to try hard or to strive, they are among the most colorful and the most improbable castes to survive the Soviet era.

While the Communist government was molding the masses into obedient servants of the state, all with similar salaries and little incentive to work, the starateli were fighting for the right to get rich and willing to break their backs to do it.

In collectives that grew from dozens to several hundred, they forced the gold-hungry state to pay them directly for results rather than a monthly salary, surviving repeated clampdowns and attempts to break their system.

“Gold diggers said, ‘I want to earn money, the more the better,’ and that was ideologically incorrect,” Postoyalkin said.

Now, under economic reforms that will give them more control than ever over their gold digging, they stand to become among the most prosperous of professions in this new era of Russian capitalism. Their prospects look especially good in Yakut-Sakha, a vast Siberian republic that turns up almost all of Russia’s diamonds and a third of its gold, about 30 tons of the coveted metal each year.

Already, gold diggers earn in a day what most Russians earn in a month. And this year, both state-owned mining companies and the groups of independent starateli are effectively going private. Although still forced to sell their gold only to the Russian government at state-set prices, they are gaining greater power to run their own affairs and keep their profits.

“We’re going to be our own masters,” exulted Alexander Volkov, the tough young chief of the 120 men--and one woman, the housekeeper--who work the gold deposits at Deelbeh Spring. In the language of the area’s Evenk natives, Deelbeh means “Drunken-Tree Spring,” so named for the crazy leaning of its trees in the swampy soil.

“And in eight or 10 years,” Volkov said, “all this will be ours. And we’ll really make it go.”

Volkov has a classic frontiersman style, an easy pride and a straight-in-the-eye look that calls to mind a Siberian John Wayne. He takes no nonsense from his men and has already fired six and fined eight others a month’s pay for drinking on the job. “I never say anything three times,” he said. “Two times I can forgive, but not a third.”

To a visitor, the domain he rules does not look like much at first. About 40 miles from the home base in Aldan and surrounded by the deep taiga (Siberian forest of pine and birch), simple log cabins housed dormitories, latrines, bath house, mess hall and a storehouse where an armed guard watched over the mined gold. All were connected by plank walkways crisscrossing the mud. Forty snuffling pigs lounged in the muck, waiting to be turned into miners’ bacon.

But on the other side of a scrubby wood from the main camp lay its two main treasures: a nondescript mass of dirt and rocks that has been regularly yielding gold and a grubby bunch of men willing to labor nonstop for the six months that the Siberian frosts allow.

During the season, they work in 12-hour shifts every day or night except for two holidays--May Day and Russian Metallurgists’ Day.

“It’s all for accursed money that we deprive ourselves this way,” said Oleg Yemelianov, 54, a round-faced native of Moldova.

But there was little rancor in his voice. He has come more than 3,000 miles east each year since 1977 to help mine Aldan’s gold and become so attuned to the pace of work that now, he said, if he were to return to the lax discipline of a government factory, “it would be irritating. We’re used to this.”

He had been chatting for only about five minutes when Volkov decided his time was up and sent him back to maintenance work on a rusty, Soviet-made T-330 bulldozer.

Nikolai Alyokhin, a Russian sporting a beard that had clearly been growing since spring, laughed at his own workload as he paused in his attempt to repair a massive water pump. “So what?” he said. “That’s why we’re called starateli. We try harder. That’s why we came here, to work.”

On the other side of a long rise of chewed-up ground, even Boris Belokopytov, toiling through his shift in hip-high rubber boots, had no complaints. He had to shout to make himself heard over the deafening clatter of rocks as they were forced against a car-sized metal sieve by the pressure from his water cannon. Just 15 feet in front of him, the water smashed against the rocks with the force of storm waves breaking against a reef.

Once through the big sieve, the gold-containing “pulp” is forced up a long pipe and through a smaller sieve; the gold that remains is deposited directly into a locked box.

“We’re here to earn money,” Belokopytov said. “If other people all worked like this, our country would be better.”

The widespread image of starateli as fiercely money-hungry souls of the wilderness even led the legendary Russian bard Vladimir Vysotsky to write a popular song about leaving town, penniless and crying, to work with the gold diggers and coming home laughing, his pockets full.

These days, the money they make sounds paltry by Western standards but princely to most Russians. If all goes as planned, Volkov said, his gold diggers will have made about 4,000 rubles a day, $20 at current rates, when the pot is divided at season’s end.

In Volkov’s simple cabin, a television, boom box and video recorder, all signs of relative wealth in Russia, shared the shelves with the cage holding two parakeets that keep him company.

They could be making much more, if only the government would pay them the world price for gold, which hovers around $350 per ounce, instead of the current rate of about $220, said Mikhail Greenberg, chairman of a starateli artel, or collective, and a member of the Russian union of starateli . “And we still can’t sell to whoever we want, that’s the most negative side of things now,” he said. “Gold and precious metal remain the monopoly of the state, and the state takes them all and decides what to keep and what to sell.”

Another prominent prospectors’ chief noted, “We’ve said, ‘Either-or: Either you give us the world price, or the starateli method will die.’ ”

Prospectors will keep fighting for more commercial freedom, Greenberg said, and will probably get it eventually.

The starateli may also see the rebirth of the very kind of eccentric lone prospector who approached Postoyalkin so many years ago. A recent government law legalizes individual prospecting, unleashing gold diggers from the tight, state-supervised collective.

Few have jumped at the chance, lacking the equipment needed to get at today’s hard-to-get gold, but that may come too, Greenberg said.

“Our gold diggers are the same kind of wolves that you have in Alaska,” he said. “It’s every person’s dream to be fully free--to decide what’s profitable himself and to be rewarded for the results of his labor.”