New Gateways Open Way to Old Soviet Union : Cities: International airlines have been among the first to bypass Moscow; it has been downgraded as a port of call.

New gateway cities are prying open the defunct Soviet empire, once known for its near-paranoid obsession with heavily guarded borders, to a flood of ideas, goods and people.

In the process, Moscow, once called the “Third Rome” as the center of the Byzantine world and later of the Communist state, has been downgraded as a port of call.

“Lights are blinking on in cities once controlled by Moscow and captured in the Soviet system,” said geographer George J. Demko, a Russian affairs specialist at Dartmouth College. “New connections are being established beyond the old Soviet borders, and new internal and external regional ‘geographies’ are being created.”

International airlines, carrying hordes of businessmen and diplomats, have been among the first to bypass Moscow, long the nucleus of a Soviet empire that spanned 11 time zones across one-sixth of Earth.

By all accounts, the Turks have led the way.

Turkish airlines, which previously flew only from Istanbul to Moscow, have opened routes to the capital cities of Alma Ata in Kazakhstan, Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Baku in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, a spokesman said.

Turkish businessmen are flooding the markets with goods as disparate as cheap clothing, hard-to-get pharmaceuticals and building supplies. Russians and Central Asians are frequent fliers the other way too. They find Istanbul a seller’s mecca for their handicrafts and religious icons, which fetch precious U.S. dollars.

More than 50 hours of Turkish television news and entertainment are broadcast every week to the five former Soviet Central Asian republics. Four of these now independent states speak languages closely related to Turkish.

Germany’s Lufthansa has recently inaugurated nonstop flights from Frankfurt to Alma Ata. The mountainous capital of Kazakhstan is well on its way to becoming gateway to the vast region of Turkistan, which was split in 1924 into the five Central Asian republics united by Islam.

Among the first passengers on the new service were expected to be diplomats who staff a host of new embassies in the Kazakh capital, and oilmen from the United States, Britain and France, representing companies that have signed lucrative deals with the Alma Ata government in recent months.

On the Baltic Sea, Estonia’s capital of Tallinn and Latvia’s capital of Riga are joining Helsinki, Finland, in expanding their avenues into Russia itself. “The Baltics are bound to benefit from the diminishing centralization,” Demko said.

Traditional gateway cities such as Helsinki, across the Gulf of Finland from St. Petersburg on Russia’s edge, are geographically well-situated entry points, with political, economic, cultural, tourist and transportation advantages.

On the Pacific, Vladivostok once was seen only from U.S. spy satellites or through submarine periscopes, but no more. The headquarters of the Russian Pacific fleet has become a leading Pacific Rim trading center and gateway, especially handy for such economic giants as South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.

An American consulate has reopened in Vladivostok after being closed for more than four decades. Alaska Airlines plans flights from Anchorage next spring.

“There are probably more Americans in Vladivostok now,” a U.S. State Department official said, “than at any time since the American intervention at the end of World War I.” The last U.S. Marines, part of an allied expeditionary force that included British and Japanese troops, left Vladivostok in 1923.

Although Moscow and St. Petersburg are still the main airline hubs, “you’ll see more flights to the Baltics, Central Asia and the Pacific,” said Terry Denny of the International Air Transport Assn. in Montreal.

New maritime gateways also are materializing.

St. Petersburg has become a primary Russian port, said Paul Scott of Sea-Land Service Inc., the only American shipping line that makes regularly scheduled cargo trips to Russia.

The port at St. Petersburg actually has become overcrowded. Odessa, which belongs to Ukraine, assesses high fees for goods destined for Russia. Shippers also complain about local organized crime syndicates skimming off goods from St. Petersburg’s highly taxed facilities.

As a result, shippers say, it is often cheaper to truck goods from Helsinki across the Finnish-Russian border.

The little-known Russian port of Novorossiysk is now “establishing itself as one of the largest on the Black Sea,” Scott said, expanding its handling of crude oil and cement. During the days of Soviet power, crude oil, which accounted for the bulk of Moscow’s hard-currency exports, left from ports in Ukraine or the Baltic states.

“There’ll be a great role for gateways as economic conditions revive and cities become rejuvenated,” said one international expert. “Right now, many of them are fighting for their lives.”