Valley Visitor to Moscow Gets Caught Up in Russian Conflict : Travel: Frankie Marx arrives as mobs storm police barricades. She and a friend find themselves trapped in an apartment one block from the tanks.

Frankie Marx was crouched on the floor of a small Moscow apartment, with tanks blasting a block away and Russian Army sharpshooters nearby trying to pick off snipers, when a thought struck her.

“This is history happening and I’m down on my hands and knees,” the Burbank woman said to herself as she got up for a better look out the window. Her friend from Brentwood, Shirley Akawie, and the Russian woman they were staying with, pulled her back from the scene of shells and bullet fire, bringing her into the safety of a back hall.

Marx, who ran a small advertising agency in downtown Los Angeles for 25 years before selling it seven years ago so she could travel, was reluctant to pass up her front row seat on history--a 13-hour battle for power.

“I was not terrified,” said Marx, for whom Boris Yeltsin’s crackdown on the hard-line Communist opponents to his rule also cut short a two-week trip to Russia by one day. “I was fascinated, but I was appalled at myself for not being terrified.”

In the past seven years as the leader of annual Sierra Club trips to what she calls “soft adventure” spots such as in East Africa, Marx had earned a reputation.

“That if you take a trip with Frankie, something will happen at the end,” said Marx, who at the end of a trip to watch the migration of polar bears in Canada was trapped for two days with the group she was leading in the worst blizzard in 35 years on the Hudson Bay. But now she had easily topped that.

“This was probably the most scary, but fascinating adventure, in which I ended a trip,” Marx said, adding that for her the tragedy was that the batteries in her camera had died two days before.

Moscow was the last stop for Marx and Akawie on a 2,000-mile boat trip from Rostov on the Don, a city south of Moscow, up the Don and the Volga Rivers. They arrived at the apartment house where their Russian hosts--a married couple--were living just as the anti-Yeltsin mob stormed through the police barricades.

They were trapped inside the building for the next day as the pro-Yeltsin tanks rolled in with troops and counterattacked. The eighth-floor apartment had a perfect view of the tanks, only a block away, as they shelled the Russian Parliament White House.

“The booming never stopped,” said Akawie. “The shells were exploding and things were whistling by the window.”

On the roof of a building across from them were Russian Army sharpshooters trying to pick off pro-Communist snipers, Marx said.

During the fighting, four people were killed behind the apartment building, and someone on the 14th floor above them had also been injured, Akawie said.

“It was a very extraordinary day and a very sad day for the Russian people,” said Marx, who was also struck by the despair that people feel from having so little to eat.

“The buildings are crumbling, the streets are falling apart and the people don’t have any food,” Marx said.

Her English-speaking interpreters earned the equivalent of $20 a month, she said, but a loaf of bread costs $1.35, and a pound of boneless beef goes for $5. Marx learned a saying from the Russians: “Freedom means nothing without food.”

Marx gave her host, a schoolteacher, apples from the boat she had been on, and the woman ate half a pound of them on the spot.

“We felt sorry for the people there,” she said. “They were seeing Russians killing other Russians.”

The news reports were all in Russian. CNN was broadcast in English but with Russian over-dubbing, so they had to rely on interpreters to know what was going on. Marx said she did not really get the full story until finding an English-language newspaper on the flight home.

They got out of the apartment the next day. After Russian soldiers searched their bags for weapons they walked 10 blocks past military barricades and through a dangerous sniper alley before they could be driven to the airport. Their guide to the airport, the owner of the company that had lined them up with the host family, did not tell them how much danger they were in until they had gotten through it.

But they had some idea anyway.

“I didn’t really know if I was going to come home to my family or not,” said Akawie, an artist and painter.

“It’s going to be an extraordinary memory,” Marx said.