COLUMN ONE : Russia’s Poor Push Their Luck : As economic crisis worsens, strapped pensioners and students fritter away their rubles on increasingly popular games of chance. They’re a wild, last hope for many.

His fur hat was moth-eaten and his trouser cuffs were ratty, but Sergei Arukonovich figured the 10-ruble note in his pocket wasn’t worth saving. It wouldn’t even buy a pair of shoelaces.

So he spent it on hope instead.

Hunched over against the blustery wind, Arukonovich, a grizzled, 70-year-old retiree, traded his faded red bank note for a crisp lottery ticket and the chance to win a jackpot of several million rubles.

“It’s not good to throw away money, but maybe if I win, my happiness will return,” he ventured, cracking a tobacco-stained smile.

This gloomy winter, when at least one-third of Russians live below the poverty line, games of chance are becoming a wild, last hope for many students, pensioners and government employees.

For the price of a loaf of bread, they can buy a silver-coated “American-style” scratch-and-win ticket, bet on the daily Sports Lotto drawing or pick six numbers in a computerized lottery.

With inflation gobbling up savings and emptying pockets, such wagers seem irresistible: Spend a few worthless rubles and buy a shot at a glittering prize. But when retirees like Arukonovich start buying lottery tickets daily, all those crumpled bank notes add up to almost one-fifth of their pensions--real money tossed away on long-shot dreams.

“Experience from around the world shows that people who live on low incomes are the most well-disposed toward lotteries,” said Alexander Gresko, deputy director of the Greek-Russian joint venture that runs Lotto Million, a flashy U.S.-type lottery that grabs Russians’ attention with television commercials and bright blue-and-yellow kiosks and has racked up 35 million rubles ($78,125) in ticket sales a week since opening last month.

Although its weekly sales seem tiny compared with the California Lottery’s average intake of $30.4 million a week (“Gee,” said one California Lottery official when told of the weekly Russian ticket averages, “we sell that much in 10 minutes.”), Lotto Million caters to a much smaller population, 9 million Muscovites, with much lower incomes, about $15 a month.

To play Lotto Million, Russians pick six numbers out of 49. The game carries long odds--1 in 14 million for the jackpot, awarded to those who pick all six numbers--although players can win lesser prizes for guessing four or five of the winning numbers. The biggest jackpot won so far was 17 million rubles ($38,000).

To date, as many Muscovites have played Lotto Million as have picked up their free privatization checks, the vouchers for investment in state-run industry that carry a face value of 10,000 rubles.

“These days,” Gresko said, “the last thing that remains for Russians is hope.”

Playing on that eternal emotion, slick-talking hucksters now make fortunes off al fresco shell games and crap games. On one teeming stretch of sidewalk a few blocks from the Kremlin, the sales patter all but drowns out traffic noise as con men try to sucker students and pensioners.

Lured by the mirage of fabulous winnings, Vasily Vasilenko, a naive 16, recently gambled his black sports watch and all his pocket money on a rigged game. He lost. “Just like a stupid kid,” he said afterward, cursing himself.

Too miserable to care that he was crying in public, Vasilenko stumbled away from the rickety gaming table, his agitated face erupting in bright strawberry-red patches.

Although they see such pitiful despair several times an hour, the con men--who earn about 20 times an average worker’s wages--remain philosophical.

“It’s mainly the (bettors’) greed that feeds the game,” said Pavel, 21, a tall, blond expert at extracting valuables from even the poorest-looking grandmother. “Maybe we’ll cure them of the gambling bug if they lose all their money to us.”

Loose-limbed and gregarious, Pavel tossed out another justification as he dashed back to his rickety card table after a short break: “Gambling is in the Russian blood.”

This country’s most beloved poet, Alexander Pushkin, used an intense game of cards as a vehicle for exploring human nature in his short story “The Queen of Spades.” Composer Peter Tchaikovsky later set the tale to music, creating a wildly popular opera.

Perhaps Russia’s most celebrated bettor is Fyodor Dostoevsky, who dashed off a novella titled “The Gambler” in less than a month in 1866. He had to hustle so he could collect an advance to cover his gaming losses and stay out of debtors’ prison.

Even proverbs reflect Russians’ legendary bent to entrust themselves to fortune. Linking two national pastimes, one saying sagely reminds Russians that “those who do not take risks will never drink champagne.”

But these days, the hunched senior citizens who queue up for lottery tickets don’t even dream of bubbly wine. They count on luck to yield a more mundane jackpot: money to buy cheese, or maybe some fresh fruit.

“I never saw a million rubles ($2,230) in my whole life,” a 57-year-old factory worker said as he waited in a 10-minute line for Lotto Million tickets. “If I won, and my heart survived the shock, it would be just incredible.”

With unemployment threatening the 87% of the work force still employed by government agencies and state-run factories, even the young are starting to feel pinched.

“Everything’s so expensive these days that many people play because they hope to earn some extra money,” said Alexander Krukov, 25. He admitted losing several months’ wages last year on slot machines before forcing himself to quit.

During the Soviet era, the state monopolized and minimized the gaming business, running a handful of official lotteries with prizes of dubious value--like the problem-plagued Moskvich sedans no one seemed to want. A few slot machines were permitted in the country and stationed in Intourist hotels for foreigners, ensuring that Russians steered clear of such bourgeois decadence.

Now, however, individual entrepreneurs are free to set up makeshift sweepstakes tables. Charities can organize their own fund-raising lotteries. And arcades have learned to entice passersby with rows of imported slot machines and loud rock ‘n’ roll.

Especially in Moscow, business is booming.

“It’s getting harder and harder to find work, so more people come to play these games,” said Sveta, grinning as a blue-collar crowd gathered around her lottery, made of numbered Ping-Pong balls that rolled crazily inside a cracked plastic hopper and tumbled out of a chute.

While the poor turn to gambling out of desperation, Russia’s nouveau riche do so out of boredom. Their conspicuous consumption highlights the polarization that has split Russian society into clusters of haves and masses of have-nots.

The 10-ruble note that buys a Lotto Million ticket doesn’t begin to cover the tip for the tuxedo-clad attendant who minds the cloakroom at Casino Arbat, one of the 30 plush casinos that have opened in Moscow since the government legalized them last spring.

The $5 entrance fee--dollars only--includes $4 worth of drinks, preferably (from the management’s point of view) alcoholic ones. Once inside, the games at most casinos are for rubles--but lots of them.

Nattily dressed in suits and silk ties, young Russian biznessmeni and Mafiosi scatter dozens of chips, each worth a physician’s weekly salary, on the green-felt numbers grid at each spin of the roulette wheel.

Others play four hands of blackjack at once, wagering thousands of rubles--a whole year’s rent for a typical apartment--on each. After several shots of vodka, they often don’t notice the dealers’ “mistakes”--sweeping away winning chips, ignoring blackjack payoffs, handing out stacks of four chips instead of five.

The government doesn’t regulate casinos at all, so the payoffs--and the odds of actually winning--vary with each establishment. “I’d say more than half are honest,” Vladimir Myeklyer, a lawyer for the Russian Assn. of Gaming Businesses, estimated optimistically.

Although the federal government is supposed to take 90% of a casino’s gross income in taxes, “the gaming business comes in second place, after drug dealing, in terms of profitability,” said Igor Ballo, owner of the Club N Casino.

Russia’s tax-collection system is notoriously weak, and most successful entrepreneurs find ways to avoid paying all of what they owe. Tax inspectors, like other Russian bureaucrats struggling to make ends meet, can rarely resist a few well-placed bribes, and some of them may help casino owners cook the books.

“I don’t say that everything in the gaming business is so honest,” said Ballo, a heavyset, flashily dressed man in a dark green jacket and gold-rimmed eyeglasses. “Frankly, Mafia structures exist in all commercial businesses in Russia.”

With the odds always in the house’s favor--and drinks always priced exorbitantly--casinos in Russia, as in the United States, tend to rake in money. Club N’s biggest onetime loss was only 600,000 rubles ($1,340), while the casino routinely collects up to a million rubles an evening from individual patrons, who return to lose night after night.

Shortly after Vasilenko cried about losing a few hundred rubles and his plastic watch in the outdoor con game, his contemporary, 18-year-old Vasya, stepped away from a roulette table at the Club N Casino and matter-of-factly estimated his night’s losses at 30,000 rubles--$67, or six times the average monthly wage.

“I play every day for a few hours,” said Vasya, a university student who declined to give his last name or disclose where he acquires his cash. Bent over the elegant table with its polished mahogany wheel, he painstakingly entered each winning number in a tiny notebook, hoping to detect a pattern. He rarely succeeded.

“When I’m all out of money, I stop,” he said.

Flaunting--and losing--big wads of money has become trendy for these young capitalists, who smoke imported cigarettes and sip imported liqueurs as they cluster around gaming tables.

“I don’t even like this very much,” confided Sergei Yakovlev, 19, looking supremely bored as he dumped tokens into a slot machine and mechanically pulled the lever. “But all my friends hang out here.”

A self-described businessman, Yakovlev, like most of the nouveau riche, keeps his income and the exact nature of his work a “commercial secret.”

Although the luxurious casinos seem to clash with the gritty poverty of everyday life in Moscow, Ballo hotly defends his trade.

“People always ask me, ‘Why do you run casinos when there are people who have nothing to eat?’ ” he said. “Well, there are rich people in Russia, too, and they’re the ones who come play. Our clients don’t empty their pockets and go hungry.”

Rich or poor, however, some find themselves addicted.

“It’s like we’re sick,” said set designer Alexander Karikonov, 41, gesturing around a smoky arcade crammed with slot machines. “You know you’ll lose, but the risk tugs at you and calls you back.”