Documentary : A Land of Tall Tales, Tipsy Men and a Tub : Life is harsh in the Siberian hinterlands. But it has its moments, a rare visitor discovers.

You could film “The Night of the Living Dead” in this Siberian hinterland without hiring any extras.

First one tipsy inhabitant staggers by. Then another reels past. Then a small group of zombie-eyed young men in dusty work clothes weave their way up the town’s only paved road.

A little girl on a late-night delivery scampers along with a full vodka bottle in the sleepy surreal light of the midnight sun. A Russian Orthodox priest pats two young Khants--the Eskimo-like natives of this swampy region near the Arctic Circle--and says paternally, “Drink, my children. It’s a festival and everything is allowed.”

Town council Chairman Vladimir Alexandrovich Lyutikov, a hearty man grown even heartier, laughs at the spectacle of a settlement of 8,000 people saturated with spirits.

“The old revolutionaries who were exiled here wrote that on days off, only the dogs here were sober,” he says. “I think the traditions haven’t changed.”

*

Everybody on a bender, everybody so hospitable they could be rivaled only by desert sheiks, everybody still tired from the weeklong rush to paint every public building and lay down the road before the anniversary festival--this feels like the real Russia. This town in the middle of the vast Siberian marshland, accessible only by river or air, turns 400 years old this year. Settled by Cossacks, it is populated now by fishery workers and boatmen whose eyes still widen when they meet a foreigner.

How do they live here? How can they stand nine months of winter followed by summers when 75 days out of 90 can be rainy? Ask them and they wax eloquent about the beauty of their birches, the rich harvest of berries and mushrooms in the woods, the complexity of life back on what they call the Big Land--European Russia.

This is the Wild North. Moscow has gotten full of Marlboro billboards, Coca-Cola booths and Mercedes-Benz sedans; St. Petersburg swarms with tourists and Baltic businessmen. But here, 1,000 miles from Moscow, there is still room for purely Russian adventure.

*

Volodya can’t get a plane out and has clearly been boozing away his time when he approaches visitors in the town canteen. “Come to Saranpaul,” he slurs.

He has cunning, squinting blue eyes and a tanned, grimy face. “We have great stones there, rutile and mountain crystals. . . .”

Rutile?

“If you don’t know what it is, I can’t tell you,” he says. (A subsequent look in the encyclopedia discloses that it is a red or brown lustrous mineral.) But “Come to Saranpaul. It’s only an hour by helicopter, or in the winter you can get there by the zimnik, “ the winter road over the frozen swamp.

Volodya, it turns out, is a trucker, proud of his ability to navigate roads so bad that it can take 48 hours to go 70 miles. He is also, it turns out, a smuggler of the minerals he is advertising--just back from Yekaterinburg, where he traded stones for the money he is now “drinking through,” as the Russians put it. If he keeps smuggling stones, he’ll be able to afford to buy an apartment and move to the Big Land to get his son educated. So long as he’s not caught first.

“It’s bad that they check you at the airport and they can throw you in prison for carrying stones without a license,” he says. “They stop you on the road, too--special police.”

Depressed at the thought, he tugs at a passing waitress for more vodka. She scolds that he has had enough already, that he should learn moderation.

“That’s the thing,” he says. “We Russians don’t know moderation.” He brightens. “But come to Saranpaul! We’ll take you fishing.”

And what are the people like there?

“The people suck,” he says. “You end up in the North either because of drinking or because of circumstances.” But no--he changes his mind. “No, no, come to visit. The people are wonderful, they’ll take you in and give you everything.”

*

The Berezovo leadership has an even more intriguing invitation: Come with us to the Source.

In midafternoon, council Chairman Lyutikov, an assortment of local and regional bigwigs and a few foreign guests pile into an Aeroflot helicopter with boxes of Bulgarian wine and an impressive 40-pound white salmon.

For half an hour it flies over untouched green-and-blue swamp until it reaches the Source--a natural hot spring, discovered when explorers looking for gas drilled a hole and a geyser of hot water came out instead. Called Bolshiye Shogany, it is surrounded by virgin birch forest where elk and bear still roam.

The spring is as unfinished and rough as all of this part of Russia. A wooden staircase rises to a point where the geyser batters and sprays bathers, and the pool below is just a dirty water hole, ringed by logs.

Visitors lounge in the hot pool drinking wine from the bottle--no long-stemmed glasses here, my dear--and those without bathing suits take a dip in their underwear.

But Vladislav Kravchenko, chief of the local airline, has big plans for this place. Western hunters will come, he says, stay in the little lodge near the pool, hunt game and then relax in the spring--and all for about half the price of anywhere else.

The white salmon is transformed into ukha, Russian fish soup, in a pot over an open fire.

“You have a big country but no ukha, “ boasts Vladimir Ulyanov, the chief of the Tyumen region’s parliament.

The picnic table is covered with bread, vodka, smoked fish, wine, ukha and a plate of the Siberian delicacy, stroganino --frozen raw fish, marinated and sliced fine, frightening to eat but delicious.

The vodka toasts begin. Ulyanov raises his glass: “To people who live in different countries, in different places, different conditions, but still believe in one thing: in kindness. Let’s drink to people, to love.”

There is no hope of taking only a sip of vodka. No excuses. “Here, you drink as much as you’re poured,” Lyutikov says with mock strictness that is not really so mock.

Interspersed with the merciless toasts are jokes about drunks. In one, a soused Russian police officer stops an equally soused driver and says blearily, “Not only were you speeding, but I see there are two of you behind the wheel.” The driver looks back even more blearily and says, “OK, I’m a little drunk, but that’s no reason for so many of you to surround the car!”

The little party is a small point of welcoming human silliness in the midst of boundless emptiness, of one giant swamp. Viktor Lisikin, a former pilot who now runs the lodge at Bolshiye Shogany, says this area never saw Soviet-era labor camps.

“You don’t need any camps here,” he said. “They just put you out on the shores and left you, and where could you go? People raised villages themselves.”

*

This is Abominable Snowman country. Literally.

Tea at the local newspaper, Novosti Ugry, in the Siberian town of Khanty Mansiysk begins decorously, with pleasantries and succinct descriptions of local politics and economics. Then it touches on local legends and the stories come fast and furious.

“Oh, yes, the snow person, he’s in our area,” Deputy Editor Yevgeniya Nikitina says with absolute seriousness.

“There’s a documented case in the Tobolsk museum,” Editor Novomir Patrikeyev says. “In 1600, the Cossacks killed an enormous red-haired snow person. . . . He’s all red-haired and one hand is gray.”

In one village, a snow person reputedly kidnaped a woman and took her to his lair, where he lived with her. People passing nearby are said to have found the strange couple’s baby girl--she was fully human, except that her left hand was big and hairy.

“I think it’s real,” says Patrikeyev, a biologist and passionate hunter, of the creature. “Although I don’t know what kind of reality--a cosmic phenomenon or what. As a biologist, I don’t know--you’d need 50 of them to keep up a population, and what do they eat in winter?”

*

Hard to say, but in summer, they could certainly do well on a diet of mosquitoes. A word to the wise: Never come to Siberia between early July and mid-August.

The mosquitoes are the size of house flies--so big that the locals tell a joke about a Siberian mosquito emerging victorious from a crash with a Russian passenger plane.

Other extremes abound. At the headquarters of the Surgut Oil & Gas Co., a giant firm, a secretary slinks by in three-inch heels and a dress cut nearly to her navel from both directions. As visitors’ mouths drop open, another employee asks innocently, “Oh, don’t they dress to go to work that way where you live?” No, she is told.

“Well, here, we go too far with everything,” she says.

Nearby, a janitor who must have never seen a vacuum cleaner struggles to sweep dust from a plush green rug with a birch broom.

*

True Russian hospitality always includes parting gifts. But what can humble Berezovo offer?

Viktor Gontarovsky, a former weightlifter and construction foreman who now heads Berezovo’s cultural department, descends into the town hall’s basement and comes up grinning. Across his office desk he lays out the bedspread-sized red banner of Leninism that used to stand in the town hall.

“For you,” he says. “Remember us.”