COLUMN ONE : Russia’s Railway to a New Era : The Trans-Siberian Express offers a trip of beauty and madness through Communist ruins and an encounter with the entrepreneurs reshaping Russia and China.

An unruly crowd swarmed around the train as it rolled into Mariinsk at dusk, five hours late. To passengers who had just been lulled by a fat orange sunset over the snow-covered Siberian forest, the desperation in the Russian townsfolk’s eyes was startling.

For the 15 minutes it stood in the station, the train was a chaotic market on wheels. Platoons of Chinese merchants descended with their awaited cargo of winter jackets, or dangled them teasingly through the windows. Frenetic bargaining, conducted with sign language and fistfuls of rubles, degenerated into thievery and violence.

Four Russians surrounded a Chinese trader and wrestled him to the platform. As a Russian policeman sat smoking on the steps of a train across the way, a fifth mugger came along, kicked the trader in the chest and made off with his jacket.

Through a train window, a buyer passed 8,000 rubles for a coat. The suspicious merchant, withholding her wares, tossed the wad of bills back. New rubles were offered, but 2,000 of them were again rejected as counterfeit. Only on the third try was the sale completed.

Mikhail Yevgenevich Safonov, the local army band conductor, surveyed the scene and declared it a typical Saturday night in Mariinsk, population 40,000, where this train stops once a week.

“It’s the only entertainment we have,” he said, waving goodby.

And so it goes at stations across Russia as the Trans-Siberian Railway enters the second century of its epic history with a new mission--a modern silk road for the westward trafficking of fabric from China to markets rising on the ruins of Soviet communism.

In the process, the world’s longest rail system--one east-west trunk spanning Russia, fed by two lines from Mongolia and China--has become a vehicle of opportunity and upward mobility for the scrappy, often shady Communists-turned-capitalists who are helping reshape both Russia and China.

The six-day, 4,876-mile journey from Beijing to Moscow via the trans-Mongolian feeder line offers a glimpse of these pioneer characters, most of whom are Chinese, against a canvas of spellbinding natural beauty.

Crisp, long-playing images of the Gobi Desert, Lake Baikal and Siberia’s birch trees are enough by themselves to make the trip unforgettable. But their magic is disrupted by mad market scenes at 34 whistle-stops across Russia that turn the train into a metaphor for the country’s post-Communist disorder.

Most Westerners approach Russia by traveling east from the United States or Europe. Since the collapse of Soviet rule, they have focused on Moscow and St. Petersburg as they push Western ideas and Western goods through the country’s European door.

As a Times correspondent starting a long-term assignment in Moscow, I decided to get there by traveling west, across the Pacific, then Siberia, then European Russia. The Trans-Siberian Express offered such an east-to-west passage--and a feel for the winds of influence from Asia.

“Sitting here day after day watching the kilometer markers go by, you get a sense of the vast distances between places that you would never get being on an airplane for a few hours,” reflected Jari Peltomaki, a ferry boat cook from Finland, after we had crossed five time zones in as many days.

The immensity and sparsity of Siberia were striking even to Russians. Greatly outnumbered on the train by Chinese traders, they shared an apprehension that Asians will rush into the Siberian void ahead of them. Said Janna Stukina, a Russian schoolteacher: “Japan and China have so many people. Russia needs more people out here.”

Driven precisely by such concern for “rich but neglected” Siberia, Czar Alexander III launched construction of the railroad in 1891. Eastbound travelers wrote most of its history--czarist troops dispatched to Russia’s Far East to discourage a Chinese invasion, trapped Czech forces fleeing across Asia after World War I, workers moving entire Soviet factories eastward over the Ural Mountains ahead of Hitler’s advancing army.

Today, history is rolling the other direction, in the form of a Chinese-dominated bazaar on wheels. The journey begins every Wednesday in Beijing.

*

Wednesday. Beijing’s cavernous rail terminal bustles at dawn as Trans-Siberian passengers file past uniformed bag checkers manning industrial-strength scales. The strict luggage limit is 77 pounds per passenger. A diesel locomotive pulls 11 green sleeper cars, a cargo car and a diner, launching our northwesterly journey toward Mongolia. We tunnel under the Great Wall. Later, a black steam locomotive with red wheels, China’s Iron Rooster, crawls backward on a parallel track.

After 10 visits, China is still exotic to Marcin Przech, but the young Polish traveler feels more at home on this train than anywhere else.

In 1989, Przech was backpacking across China during spring break from the University of Lublin when he figured out how to pay his fare home. There was no weight limit on the train then, so he bought 200 pounds of leather gloves in Beijing and sold them in the Siberian city of Irkutsk.

His profit was so high that he repeated the trip every holiday, joining the first wave of post-Communist Trans-Siberian traders.

As Communist regimes collapsed from Berlin to Moscow, so did centrally planned government-to-government trade with China. Individual merchants like Przech--first from Poland, then Russia--moved to fill the gap. They traveled to Beijing, bought duffel bags full of Chinese down coats, silk blouses, leather jackets, boots, gloves, warm-up suits and running shoes, and took them back on the train to sell at home.

Soon the railway was known as the “new silk road,” roughly paralleling the silk trade routes established across central Asia in the 13th Century when Marco Polo and other European merchants reached China.

But late last year, Chinese traders with better access to clothing factories at home discovered the train market and took it over, aided by eased travel curbs and capitalist reforms in their own Communist-ruled country. By that time, the most successful Polish and Russian traders had moved up; today they ship air containers of fabric from Beijing to Moscow and Warsaw.

“It’s hard to be a small player in this game,” said Przech, who still rides the Trans-Siberian. “For me the game is over. But the train has become a way of life. The conductors know me, and we’re friends. Sometimes after a trip I cannot sleep I’m so used to the sound of the wheels. So I keep traveling. I feel like a Gypsy soul.”

*

Thursday. We wake up in Mongolia, in the pale yellow grassy steppe and dune-shaped hills of the Gobi Desert. The moon sets and the sun rises, illuminating patches of snow. Inhabitants are scarce: a herd of two-humped Bactrian camels, a settlement of yurt dwellers, wild horses, an army base, a lone horseman racing across the plains. Jari, my Finnish acquaintance, spots a golden eagle. A tumbleweed rolls in the wind.

Unfortunately for many who travel for travel’s sake, conditions aboard the Trans-Siberian can feel as austere as the scenery outside. The price of a Beijing-to-Moscow sleeper berth sounds like a bargain--$155 for second class, $437 for “deluxe”--until you see what you pay for.

Gone is the real luxury of Czarist times--the marble bathtubs, hairdressing salons, room service meals, the piano. Today there are no private toilets, no bathtubs anywhere, no hot running water.

The Chinese diner is replaced at the border by a Mongolian restaurant car, then, in Russia, by a Russian one. Each change inspires fantasies of food worth writing about. None of it is. The most exciting thing about the Russian diner is the abacus used by the waiter to add up the bill.

There are two saving graces at the rear of each carriage: the provodnik , or attendant, and the samovar.

Xu Zhi Kun, the amiable Chinese attendant on our car, kept the eight sleeping compartments clean, changed currency and served as a tour guide. At each station he loaded coal and stoked the boiler to keep the carriage warm and the samovar steaming. Once I saw him stuffing pink toilet paper around a leaky doorway to keep out the snow from a Siberian blizzard.

The samovar is the passenger’s only source of boiling water. Thanks to Xu, I acquired a knee-high thermos to take the water to my compartment for tea, trail food and sponge baths.

Merchants have crowded pleasure travelers off the train in recent years by filling the aisles and even the toilets with their huge duffel bags. Cramping eased somewhat after Beijing imposed its luggage limit last summer, but there’s no refuge from the cigarette smoke. Smoking was once banned except in the cold passages between cars. Not anymore. Many traders puffed incessantly, turning our train into a horizontal chimney.

Still, among the 300 to 400 passengers were at least a dozen Westerners having a splendid time. Hugh Nelson and Jenene James, a young Australian couple, were traveling around the world on a year’s leave from their government jobs. Amaury Aubree, a 24-year-old Frenchman who had been in Japan to seek his fortune, was enjoying his last days of civilian life before starting obligatory military service at home.

D. W. F. Taylor, a retired British army colonel in the Queen’s Messenger Service, was shuttling diplomatic pouches to the embassy in Mongolia and enjoying his 14th ride over one of his beloved landscapes--the Gobi Desert.

Friday. We’re in Russia, checking the new dining car, when there’s a rush to the window. “The lake!” someone exclaims. On the right, wind stirs up the lead-gray waters of Baikal--a late autumn flurry before the world’s deepest lake turns to ice. As the train hugs a U-shaped path around Baikal’s southern tip, the sun turns the snow pink on its hilly shoreline. Janna, my Russian lunch guest, spoils the idyllic image by pointing out a paper mill notorious for polluting the lake.

Growing up in China, Mister Bright--the only name he gives Westerners--dreamed of the Russia depicted in the works of Pushkin and Chekhov. The Chinese son of a Russian language professor, he also took inspiration from a Chinese proverb: “Travel 10,000 roads as you read 10,000 books.”

A year ago, at age 32, he said he “decided to be brave.” He quit a lazy job in the Chinese Communist bureaucracy to live out his fantasies on the Trans-Siberian. Today, as the train rounds Lake Baikal, his thoughts focus not on nature but on the looming Russian market.

Bright is a product of capitalist reforms that have transformed China over the past decade. He’s part of an eight-man venture selling purple and green zippered jackets for 5,000 rubles ($11) off the train one week of each month.

Because he exchanges his ruble receipts for dollars and smuggles them out of Russia to evade taxes, Bright let me into his secretive world on the condition that his Chinese name not be published.

Hunched over a snack of salted fish and Chinese vodka, he boasted that his jackets, peddled as goose down, are really stuffed with chicken feathers. “At first Russians would buy anything,” he said. “Now they are getting smart.”

Besides tax inspectors and irate consumers, Bright faces shrinking profits because of the baggage limit and the ruble’s dramatic plunge. The group’s net earnings have dwindled from a hefty $7,800 per person on each journey last spring to a few hundred dollars today. As a hedge, he has invested $14,000 in train earnings in a new airborne export venture to Romania.

But now, crossing Siberia, Bright’s biggest worry is theft. At each stop, four of his salesmen descend to the platform and stand back to back facing four directions so none can be attacked from behind. Three others sell from a window--one taking money, one issuing jackets, one watching for trouble.

“Trade is like a war,” he said. “Sometimes the Russian wins. Sometimes the Chinese wins. Once you ride this train for the first time, you are not afraid of anything.”

*

Saturday. Siberia is a parade of bare birches on snow-covered hills, a stark backdrop for the crows and occasional evergreen firs. We stop in the industrial cities of Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk, but the enduring images are the villages in between. Most homes are of unpainted planks. Some have outhouses and crooked wooden fences. Laundry flutters in the frigid wind, a rare flash of color. Few people are out and about. The Tom River is already ice, its last waves frozen in place.

Viewed from this landscape, Mister Bright’s trade venture is one of the hottest games in Siberia.

Most of the Russians who crowd each station are individual wholesalers. At any hour the train stops, even 2 a.m., they jostle for Chinese clothing at platform prices and resell for a profit in town. Russians use the derogatory term shmotki to describe this merchandise, but they fight over it.

Russia’s messy transition from communism has put many people out of work. Even those with jobs buy and sell what they can to defend wages against inflation. The weekly trainload of Chinese shmotki is a gold mine for Russian entrepreneurs, pickpockets and other opportunists--and a scandal for anyone who misses the old order.

The word Russians on the train used most often to describe this new order is bardak, which means not only a disorder or a mess but also a whorehouse.

“My men await the arrival of these trains with dread,” said Leonid Ivanovich Ryabov, the railway police chief in Krasnoyarsk. “The dense crowd on the narrow platform makes it impossible to load or unload luggage or to carry out any maintenance. . . . We tried one day to cordon off the station, but the enraged crowd of speculators overcame our barrier.”

Some of these hustlers ended up on our train, paying less than $1 to ride between stops within Russia and peddle their own goods--champagne, vodka, ice cream (in November!), wristwatches, cigarettes and 10,000-ruble privatization vouchers--shares of state-owned industry issued by the government to give each citizen a stake in Russia’s capitalist system.

A blonde wearing a miniskirt, black stockings and leather boots came in from the Siberian cold and joined the tiresome parade of hustlers cruising the corridor.

While Jari Peltomaki and I were in the diner, a small suitcase vanished from my compartment and a backpack from his. Both compartments were locked, but our attendant had warned us that some of the Russians on board had master keys. The backpack, emptied of most of its contents, turned up later on a different carriage, stuffed in the ceiling panel above a toilet.

“Unfortunately, today we have a sick society,” said Nicolai Teplekov, conductor of the three Russian carriages linked to the train after it entered the country. Asked why the sleeping compartments weren’t more secure against theft, Teplekov paused. He has been riding this train 45 years.

“When they designed these wagons,” he said, “we lived honest lives.”

*

Sunday. After crossing Siberia, we climb into the Urals, passing a white stone obelisk marking the continental divide between Asian and European Russia. Moscow is still 1,101 miles away.

Wang Weizheng, vice president of China’s CITIC Tianjin Industrial Development Co., is on his way to negotiate trade deals in Moscow. But he’s more interested in the Asian side of Russia he has just traversed.

“The future of our trade with Russia is in the east,” he said, explaining why he was traveling by rail. “I wanted to see that part of Russia with my own eyes.”

Two-way commerce between China and Russia has grown since the two countries ended 30 years of diplomatic estrangement in 1989 and is now running at a rate of $4 billion a year. Much of it is nurtured by private entrepreneurs like the merchants on this train and by local governments along both sides of the border.

Wang hopes to boost that total significantly. His state-owned company, with $18 million in assets, is negotiating in Moscow to set up joint ventures with 14 Russian companies to trade Chinese textiles and processed food for Russian steel, cars and chemicals.

Clad in navy pin-striped trousers and a blue V-neck sweater, Wang was dressed a cut above his small-time fellow traders on the train. He made no secret of his disdain for their business practices.

“The Chinese small peddlers buy something very bad and sell it very expensive in Russia,” he said. “They hurt the reputation of Chinese people and Chinese goods. They are a real problem for us. Their activities should be controlled.”

*

Monday. Crossing the Volga, Europe’s longest river, we enter the home stretch, past the blue and gold domes of cathedrals in Zagorsk and the rural wooden dachas where Muscovites spend weekends. Moscow’s Yaroslavl Station looms like a gray and white monster in the late afternoon rain.

After so many frantic whistle-stops, Moscow is an anticlimax. No anxious buyers wait at the station. Chinese merchants say a Russian Mafia controls the place, so they fold up their bazaar, melt into the city, buy dollars and quickly head home--to start the cycle again.

The dynamics of Russia’s growing contact with China lie not in Moscow but thousands of miles and a few days back east.

There were moments on the train when that contact had a neighborly feel. Russian and Chinese passengers sat together and debated the historic shifts of their time: Gorbachev’s legacy in Russia. Mao’s in China. Can capitalism transform China under Communist Party rule? Will it work at all in Russia?

The rest of the time they eyed each other warily.

“Most Russians are good people, but they think they are poor,” said Mister Bright. “Maybe the only way for some of them not to feel so poor is to rob the rich Chinese.”

Some Russians said that the Chinese, who look more prosperous each year, are deserving targets for the frustration born of watching Mother Russia become such a bardak.

“It is humiliating to see desperate Russian people holding their crumpled money up to the train, paying for something they don’t even see properly, while the amused Chinese laugh at them through the windows,” said Ryabov, the railway cop.

But others in Russia, like Valery Dyachenko, recognize the Chinese contribution to Russia’s rebirth.

Dyachenko’s grandfather migrated from the Ukraine to Russia’s Far East in 1906 to work on the railroad as a machinist, alongside immigrant Chinese laborers. The family settled in Ulan Ude, near the Mongolian border, where Dyachenko recently boarded the train to go see his sister in Moscow.

The retired Russian army officer was philosophical about the disorders he witnessed along the way.

“This is the beginning of a new economy for Russia,” he said. “We don’t understand the free market like you Americans do. We need help and we need time to develop. Perhaps this is what it was like in your American Wild West.”

Sergei Loiko of The Times’ Moscow bureau contributed to this report.

Deals on Wheels

The scenic Trans-Siberian rail journey from Beijing to Moscow is punctuated by frenzied trading at each whistle-stop. Merchants riding the train peddle their wares to desperate Russians in cutthroat trading.

---- Trans-Siberian route

-- Trans-Mongolian link

Journey length: 4,876 miles

Travel time: Six days

Cost: $155 for second class, $437 for “deluxe”