COLUMN ONE : Stuck in the Mud in Russia : The spring thaw and notoriously bad roads mean a miserable month of muck. Stranded residents complain the government leaves too many routes unpaved with bad intentions.

The road to Anna Tsvetkova’s house meanders two miles down a deeply rutted dirt track, sometimes vanishing into the vast, marshy, muddy morass that is Russia in springtime.

Cars and trucks are no match for the devouring muck; only the clumpy wheel prints of heavy Soviet tractors show where the road once lay. A sturdy villager with good rubber boots can make the two-mile trek in less than an hour. But the nearest doctor is 11 miles away.

“If I get sick, I will just have to die,” Tsvetkova said with the blunt fatalism bred of 80 years of Russian peasant life. “Nobody fixes our road.”

The United States has spring; Russia has mud. Come April, the sticky black stuff is as omnipresent as snow in winter. It oozes up from under the sidewalk, splatters pedestrians to the waist and clings fast to everything that moves.

Germans and Swedes, Finns and Norwegians, all have managed to build roads that stand up to a climate nearly as harsh as Russia’s. But they have a historical fondness for good roads--and far less territory to cover.

Even as the 20th Century draws to a close, the Soviet-built road system is still no match for the indomitable Russian mud.

So tenacious is the mire that some rich city Russians forsake their Mercedeses in spring for imported Range Rovers that fare better on the tough drive to the country dacha.

Rural dwellers just brace themselves for up to a month of soggy isolation during the spring thaw (and the autumn rains), much as they have done for centuries. They call the condition bezdorozhye , or “roadlessness.”

The enduring nature of this misfortune is a symbol of how inexplicably difficult it has always been--and how difficult it remains--to change Russia.

From the Ural Mountains to the Bering Sea, spring melt in the permafrost zone creates thousands of square miles of mire, and huge swaths of territory are accessible only by helicopter.

Roadlessness also reigns in European Russia.

Mud-locked Podosyonovo, a pleasant summer dacha site for Muscovites in the Tver region, is only 105 miles from the Kremlin.

In the nearest city, Kimry, asphalt roads that seemed solid enough last summer have all but disappeared.

Local officials blame marshy soil that simply swallows up roads unless they are shored up every three or four years, and blame Moscow for never sending enough money to maintain them. Outside City Hall, the main street is so deeply cratered that traffic barely outpaces pedestrians.

During mud season, those who can avoid driving do.

The railroads are built to withstand the spring onslaught, and train travel nowadays is rarely disrupted.

Villagers in towns such as Podosyonovo--which lies along the Medveditsa River, a tributary of the Volga--travel by boat if they can. For those who do not own tractors, the best way to brave the mud is on horseback.

“Russia has two woes: roads and fools,” an old maxim says. The villagers of Syrkino, a few miles from Podosyonovo, complain of both. Local authorities have been promising them a paved road for years, but a waterlogged dirt lane is all that links the outside world to their 16 wooden farmhouses with old-fashioned carved and brightly painted trim.

“They tried stone, then they laid sand, but nothing held,” said Vladimir Kurilov, who runs the local library. “In two or three years, the land just swallowed it up.”

As Russia’s economic crisis worsens, bus service along the dirt road has become more irregular, villagers said.

A truck that is supposed to deliver fresh bread comes only once a week. During mud season, it sometimes does not come at all.

“This bread is stale!” shouted farmer Antonina Kuchumova, waving a hard brown loaf she had plucked from the back of the truck. “In the Soviet times, there was bus service, and under the democrats there is none. Of course it is difficult in spring and fall, but how did the bus make it here in Soviet times?”

Other elderly villagers stood ankle-deep in the muddy road and nodded in agreement.

“When the local officials want to go fishing or pick mushrooms, we have bus service,” Kuchumova said bitterly. “The rest of the time, they say the roads are too bad.”

“Our roads are truly a national tragedy,” said Robert G. Kudryashov, deputy director general of the Russian Highway Department.

Efforts to remedy the problem have bogged down in the country’s worsening economic crisis, he said.

Russia’s vast territory was mostly settled by river, and water remained the most reliable form of transportation until the railroads were built in the late 19th Century.

The first paved road was not built in Russia until 1817, and by 1913 the nation still had only 10,108 miles of pavement.

Even in Josef Stalin’s time, horse-drawn sleighs still glided down flat frozen riverbeds in winter.

Nearly every great Russian writer, from Nikolai Gogol to modern satirists, has lamented the nation’s primitive, muddy highways, a tradition that persists to this day.

The Russian language even has a term that combines an expletive with the word for pothole.

Travel in winter, cold as it may be, is actually easier than in spring.

In the marshy far north, cars and trucks move more easily across the hard-frozen steppe.

In spring, the snow melts, and up to eight feet of marshy ground thaws. But the bottom layer of permafrost stays frozen, and the water, with nowhere to drain, turns the top layer of soil into a thick, muddy soup.

Gogol wrote of the pervasive mud and the “black-footed” peasant girls of the black earth region of southern Russia, a fertile crescent whose sticky soil resembles that of the U.S. Dakotas.

To stop the mud, Russians once tossed rough-hewn logs across the marshiest sections of road. In 1839, the Marquis de Custine, a French nobleman, described travel by carriage outside of St. Petersburg as bone-jarring torment.

“If we are to believe the Russians, all their roads are good during the summer season, even those that are not the great highways,” the marquis wrote. “I find them all bad.”

And while Russia’s General Winter is credited for defeating the invading armies of Sweden’s Charles XII, Napoleon and Hitler, General Mud deserves equal kudos, according to military historians.

Napoleon lost much of his artillery to the October muck on his way to Moscow, severely weakening his army even before winter set in, according to Alexander N. Krenke, head of the climatology laboratory of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

“The snow beat Napoleon only at the very end,” Krenke said.

Napoleon was fortunate that he did not venture farther south, he said. “If it had been black earth mud, Napoleon himself would have disappeared into it.”

Hitler’s Panzer divisions also bogged down in the autumn mud, his generals unprepared for the bitter winter and appalled by the dreadful highways.

“The Germans had this Western, civilized mentality that saw a tank as 100 times stronger than man, and felt that when such a huge machine bogged down, there was nothing man could do about it,” military historian Yuri A. Polyakov said. Russian soldiers, inured to mud, would simply pick their own tanks up, or haul them out with ropes and horses.

The Soviet Union made a wartime virtue of its brutal weather and backward highways with the propaganda slogan, “What is good for a Russian is death to a German,” Polyakov said.

The slogan also reflects a secret, sneaking, stubborn pride that Russians feel in the very roads they curse.

This is the romance of a tough people who are envious and yet contemptuous of effete foreigners, and who see Russia’s daunting isolation as a source of its spiritual strength.

“Bad roads were the sickness of the Russian state,” said transportation expert Sergei A. Takhov of the Russian Institute of Geography. “But they preserved Russia’s virginity.”

Today, Russians frequently point to their crumbling pavement as proof of the ineptitude of President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government.

Yet Yeltsin himself is a man who appreciates a good road.

In his new memoir, “The Struggle for Russia,” Yeltsin writes that the long-delayed paving of the route to his dacha in Arkhangelskoye, about 15 miles from Moscow, took place Aug. 19, 1991, the day of the hard-line Communist coup attempt.

“Impulsively, I went up and introduced myself to the guys working on the road,” Yeltsin wrote. “The hell with the coup, this historic event! The hot asphalt smelled strangely reassuring. It meant the convenience of a road.”

Despite major Soviet road-building programs, Russia still has only about 420,000 miles of paved roads--1/20th the number of U.S. roads per square mile--and needs twice that amount, officials said.

Moreover, after nearly a decade of economic decline, roads and bridges that were never designed to carry 10-ton trucks are decaying quickly. What is repaired is often done shoddily.

“The Moscow roads are a nightmare!” Polyakov wailed. “Sometimes when they patch them, they lay asphalt right in pools of water.”

As Russia tries to forge new economic and trade links to the West, officials say the need to upgrade the aging infrastructure is acute. That includes a Third World telephone system, an antiquated air-traffic control system, wildly energy-inefficient utilities and, of course, the transportation system.

Traffic on Russian roads crawls at an average speed of less than 19 m.p.h., compared to 50 m.p.h. on European roads, according to the Highway Department.

The bad roads boost transportation costs by up to 30%, wear out tires up to 80% faster, shorten the service life of automobiles by up to one-third and cut overall productivity in half.

“They say roads in America are good because dollars roll along them,” Kudryashov said.

U.S. manufacturers can keep small inventories because they can quickly order and receive supplies and spare parts, while Russian factories, especially in the north, must stockpile during the short summer most of what they need for the rest of the year, he said.

But money to upgrade the highways--so urgently needed if Russian industry is ever to compete in the global market--is in desperately short supply. So are bulldozers, graders and asphalt-laying machines, equipment that is now mostly made in another country--Ukraine.

Prospects for change, as always in Russia, are dubious.

But then, Russia’s leading bard predicted as much. Alexander Pushkin wrote in “Eugene Onegin,” his 1831 epic poem, of a future Russia united by roads. It would be changed beyond recognition--and perhaps even unencumbered by mud--”after, say, 500 years.”