Culture : In Siberia, the Misfortune Comes in on Big Wolf Feet : A stolid, stoic breed survives on the steppes amid the fever of cataclysmic change.

Old Russian adage: When the wolves begin to multiply, expect misfortune.

In the past two years, the wolves of the steppes and woods of the Omsk region in western Siberia have more than tripled their numbers, devouring scarce game and worrying rangers.

The reason for their growth is simple; the government could no longer afford to pay bounties to local hunters for killing about 100 wolves a year, the slaughter that balances predator and prey.

But Boris Mishkin, chief of Omsk’s hunting authority, prefers the mystical interpretation.

“We know the superstition,” the strapping woodsman said. “Whether it was before the Civil War or World War II, the wolves came before a catastrophe. And now, the misfortune is already here--we don’t need to wait.

“Russia has stopped fighting the wolves. We’re in a fever,” he said. “Everything living is in a fever.”

Siberians are a stolid, stoic breed, but the fever of these times of cataclysmic change has penetrated even to the depths of their provincial calm. The buffer of distance--the saying goes that in Siberia it’s 5,000 versts from thought to thought--is no protection from the turmoil emanating from Moscow. Omsk is remote enough to have had not a single reported case of AIDS among a population of 1.2 million, but it suffers from different maladies--spiritual malaise and deep economic crisis.

Reflected in everything from the burgeoning wolf population to the frustration of the techno-whizzes at a local cryogenics plant, this is the kind of period that Russians call smuta (SMOO-tah), a time of troubles, of murkiness and great confusion.

The Great Smuta in Russian history came at the end of the 16th Century, after Ivan the Terrible killed his only heir and plunged the country into a bloody period of dueling dynasties and pretenders to the throne that ended with the ascension of the Romanovs in 1613.

The current chaos is subtler, especially in distant areas such as Omsk nearly 1,500 miles, or 2,500 versts , southeast of Moscow. But the pain of change runs deep, and smuta is still the word Omsk Gov. Leonid K. Polezhayev uses to describe the sense that the old system has collapsed and the new one will take a long time yet to build.

“We have to live through this period of smuta ,” he said. “Then serious people will come to power, serious politicians, and now is when we have to mold them.”

Omsk, a defense industry bastion amid grain-growing country, has thrown off its Communist trappings like the rest of Russia. What used to be the regional Communist Party headquarters now houses the governor and his administrative staff. Most of the Communist bosses have gone into private business and the former party newspapers are going private too. The unwieldy regional council has been pared from 250 members to 30 and can pass an agenda in five minutes instead of three days.

But the essence of post-Communist reform, the changeover from central planning to a market-driven economy, is only limping forward. Toward what, it is not altogether clear. And the whole process hurts so badly, from the mounting unemployment to the insultingly small pensions, that even Polezhayev, a no-nonsense manager, finds himself caught with a certain nostalgia for the old days.

“The might of the Soviet Union was created by a strong central authority and based on the toughest power and fear,” he said. “Everything was held together on that. It was the hoops that ringed the barrel. You take them away and the barrel falls apart. And the system of new state relations without tough control is seen as weak power.”

“There was a system of ties--reports, analyses, checks--you were always accountable. There’s none of that now,” he said. “Sometimes there’s a kind of emptiness and awkwardness--no one calls to check up and for months the phone (from Moscow) is silent.”

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Polezhayev, a compact man with a straight, opaque gaze who was formerly the chief of a monumental canal-building project in the desert of Kazakhstan, manages to keep Omsk running. By some accounts he does it nearly single-handedly, wheedling money out of Moscow even as he struggles to make his fiefdom and all of Siberia more independent.

Boris Tyulkov, President Boris N. Yeltsin’s representative in Omsk, said the governor “squeezes out money and runs around and gets funds for various projects.” Nevertheless, the region remains deeply dependent on Moscow, if only for bank loans and government orders for grain and armaments. But the Kremlin, sunk ever deeper in deficit, is not much of a backer anymore.

Last fall, Omsk threatened to stop paying its federal taxes if the government would not settle up what it owes the region. Many debts remain, like the millions that the Defense Ministry owes the once-proud military factories of Omsk that put out everything from the T-80 tank to airplanes and rocket engines. Left without operating funds like much of Russian industry, the defense plants stand largely idle.

The stream of complaints Tyulkov has received in recent weeks appeared to underscore regional helplessness. He spoke with farmers who asked how they were going to manage spring planting without credit and tractors; students and teachers protesting their miserable wages and stipends, and Russians making a mass exodus from Kazakhstan to Omsk to escape fears of rising Kazakh nationalism.

“If politics on the federal level is not redirected, the region will be in the toughest situation because we’re the most vulnerable, we’re in the epicenter, in the center of the tangle of problems,” said Vladimir Radul, editor of the newspaper Omsky Vestnik.

Farmers “are in debt up to their ears,” he said.

Tyulkov reported that it has become so expensive to produce food that consumers simply cannot afford many of the basics. He said 1,800 tons of butter spoiled recently because its price was out of reach.

And the industrial outlook is so grim--production in Russia has dropped more than 25% so far this year compared to last year--that the other day, Radul said, he heard a radio ad offering courses to defense engineers to help them re-qualify as secretaries.

“That attests to the degradation of society,” he said, “to a sickness, loss of hope and faith. It’s a tragedy for society to lose its scientific potential.”

At the Sibcryotechnica plant, these are days of exasperation.

The plant, with more than 5,000 employees, does not do the kind of people-freezing that cryogenics is known for in the United States. Rather, it employs super-low-temperature technology to turn out products from giant Thermos-type bottles to freeze-drying machines and air conditioners for tanks.

But “high-tech can’t work in anarchy,” said plant director Alexander Gresin, a professorial man whose pale skin seems to bespeak the cold temperatures of his field. “You can’t have high technology without high organization.”

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In the old days, he said, “The government tried to control everything down to the price of matches and that was wrong; now the government wants to remove itself altogether from the economy and that’s also wrong.”

All Gresin wants from Moscow is basic conditions--normal roads and transport, communications, reasonable taxation, maybe a little encouragement here and there for domestic production, as he has seen his rivals obtain in other countries.

Instead, the government takes 86% of the firm’s profits in taxes and gives little in return. Sibcryotechnica has laid off nearly one-third of its workers in the last three years, Gresin said, and has found foreign markets exceedingly difficult to crack. It has devoted enormous efforts just to re-establish ties with the formerly Soviet firms that used to be its suppliers and customers before everything fell apart.

“We live in a mode of simple survival.” he said.

Sibcryotechnica and other defense plants like it that make up 70% of Omsk’s economy will surely hobble through somehow, but at what cost?

This period is good for wolves but bad for people, Mishkin of the hunting authority said: “Russia is going through a complex time and people are losing their humanity because life is so tough. And that, for Russia, is a tragedy,” he said.

“The chance in Russia comes once in a thousand years when you can steal and no one stops you, and that’s bad for our people,” he said. “You survive better when you stick together. Even wolves understand that, but the Russian people haven’t understood it yet.”

“Our hands are still tied--only before it was by ideology and now it’s by finances,” journalist Radul said.

Four or five private trading companies in Omsk have become regional giants, with the potential to invest millions in the local economy, but some see even the new capitalists’ riches as demoralizing because the money is believed to be tainted.

Said Yuri Berezhnoy, editor of the Vecherny Omsk newspaper: “The first way it came was through hidden party funds and the second way was by robbing the people through linking up with the West,” and selling off state-owned raw materials under the table.

In any case, the rich wheeler-dealers in their BMWs are by far the exception. Omsk at large, though a nicely tended and pleasant metropolis with a well-preserved pre-revolutionary central street, is looking decidedly threadbare. Even the carpet at the administration building is wearing thin, and money--the lack of it--is the theme everywhere.

Sometimes, Gov. Polezhayev said, “I don’t want to go to work because people will ask for money and money and money. In Omsk there is an exaggerated image of the governor.”

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Lena Kosheleva, a history student at Omsk’s university, was horrified to find out that she has to pay 2,000 rubles a day--about $1--to use the archives and library of the local museum. That may not sound steep, but it is a budget-breaker for a student with a monthly stipend of only $7 per month.

Vladimir Selyuk, a local historian, can describe eloquently the first Cossack expeditions that set out from Omsk in the 18th Century, how the city became the center of Western Siberia and a garrison town that helped Russia conquer the East.

But as for the future, “We ourselves don’t know what kind of society we’re building,” he said.

Smuta: Trouble at the Door

The superstition in western Siberia is that a rise in the wolf population means catastrophe is at hand. The Russians have a word for these dark days: smuta, a time of troubles, confusion and murkiness.