Changing Lifestyles : Russian Capitalists Hitting the Streets : Critics warn the nation is turning into a bazaar, not a market economy.

They stand in frozen slush at curbside during winter’s fleeting daylight, a neat row of middle-aged and elderly women, each holding up a single item--a plastic doll, a raw fish, a sweater--waiting like statues for some buyer to make their day so they can go home.

At one end of the line outside Moscow’s Central Market last Friday stood Yevgenia Matveyevna, 54, a retired computer processor. From her arms hung empty white plastic shopping bags--the kind Muscovites need for groceries but cannot readily find.

On a good day, Matveyevna, who waits in a department store line to pay 7 rubles apiece for these bags, can resell 10 of them for 20 rubles each--a day’s profit of roughly 30 cents to support herself and her 81-year-old mother. Since inflation slashed a once-adequate retirement pension to $6 a month, bag peddling has become her livelihood.

Driven by ambition or simply the need to survive, tens of thousands of Russians have joined a budding network of flea markets, kiosks and commercial stores in the year since President Boris N. Yeltsin’s team of radical reformers started dismantling the centrally planned Soviet economy.

But now that the reformers have been ousted, this gutter-level capitalism is under fire as a symbol of what has gone wrong with Russia’s experiment in market economics.

Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, a former Communist gas industry manager who became the new prime minister last week, sent shudders of apprehension through the streets of Moscow when he declared that Russia should move to “a real market” and not a “bazaar.”

“Our country, with its powerful infrastructure, with its wealth in resources, must not become a country of street merchants,” he declared.

In Chernomyrdin’s view, Russians are trading too much and producing too little. He wants the state to reverse the decline of its industry by restoring subsidies withdrawn from Soviet-era factories unable to compete in the marketplace.

Some of the new capitalists now fear a return to the days when Communist regimes arrested “economic criminals.” The new minister’s remarks at least appear to signal restrictions on the cheap imported consumer goods that now sell briskly--and legally--on city streets.

But merchants contend that the explosive growth of such commerce will be hard to control.

“A bazaar?” asked Irina Yerofeyeva, who offers Polish cosmetics, American cigarettes and Cuban cigars from a kiosk a few feet from where Matveyevna was peddling her bags. “Maybe he meant us. I think it’s a good idea to have a bazaar. People can buy things they couldn’t get before, and we no longer have to sell under the table.”

Just steps past Yerofeyeva’s sidewalk kiosk, among the mountains of fresh fruit and vegetables in the covered Central Market stalls, people lined up on both sides of the debate about Russia’s economic changes.

The market is dominated by produce and dark-skinned merchants from the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, people now viewed by many race-conscious Russians as foreign speculators getting rich at their expense.

“These people have time to go buy this food and sell at a huge profit to those who must work,” said Julia Gorbacheva, a 15-year-old student at a teacher training institute. “This should be controlled by the state.”

“We’re not speculators,” protested Zaur Djaforov, who was selling watermelons, tomatoes and apples from his native Azerbaijan, as well as kiwi fruit from New Zealand. “We sell what we grow. Look at those women selling bread. They’re the speculators.”

Zinaida Ivanova, 66, clutched her basket of fresh bread defensively. Each day, she explained, she stands in line at the bakery, buys 10 loaves and resells them “to millionaires in this market who don’t want to wait.” Her daily profit is less than a dollar, she said.

The Tishinsky Market, near the Belarus railway station a few miles away, offers a more typical look at Moscow’s retail scene--and more evidence that it’s here to stay.

At Tishinsky, poor Russians sell to poor Russians, and most of the goods--from tools to clothes to rubber gloves--are their own belongings, things that hard times have forced them to sell. Nobody is a millionaire.

“We’re just third-class people, and so are our customers,” said a 60-year-old retired railroad worker who identified herself only as Maria. She was selling vases made from empty cans of imported beer that she had collected from restaurants.

“These . . . people must be grateful to us because they cannot buy in the stores,” she said. “They can’t live without the bazaar. They can only look in the windows at the beautiful things in life.”

Many merchants at both markets are retired people whose pensions have been devalued and savings nearly wiped out by inflation that surpassed 2,000% this year.

Back at the Central Market, Matveyevna the bag peddler said she supported the new prime minister’s idea of restoring some central economic control.

“If he wants to clean up this bazaar, he’ll have to give back the pensions that were robbed from us,” she said. “If he does this, I will be glad to go back and just sit on a bench near my home.”

“Why do I have to do this?” she added. “Our Russian soul does not accept this way of life. We were raised so we could work honestly.”

Andrei Ostroukh of the Times Moscow Bureau contributed to this article.