Baltics-Moscow Feud Outlasts Troops Issue : Europe: The Red Army is gone, but Russian surveyors are trying to claim land in border dispute with Estonia.

A day after the tiny Baltic nations bade good riddance to the Red Army, Russian surveyors were hacking through a forest Thursday in what is viewed here as a menacing new incursion.

Escorted by lumberjacks and gun-toting soldiers, the surveyors are marking a 56-mile stretch of the Russian-Estonian border, planting concrete poles every 50 yards to tighten Moscow’s hold on 1,430 square miles. A two-headed eagle, the Russian symbol, glares from a plaque on each pole.

The demarcation began just after Russia agreed in July to withdraw its last troops from Estonia and just as Estonia was reviving its claim to the territory, which the Soviet Union gave up in 1920 and grabbed back in 1940 when the Red Army occupied all of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

That occupation is over now. But the eagles on the poles are a sign that the bitter, half-century conflict between Moscow and the Baltics is not.

Leaders across the Baltics say the feud is simply entering a more subtle phase in which border claims, trade restrictions, energy dependence, television propaganda and infiltration by criminals are the main threats to national security.

“I call upon our friends abroad not to fall prey to the illusion that the withdrawal of occupation forces has brought the final solution to the ‘Baltic question,’ ” Estonian President Lennart Meri said in a speech Wednesday after the last Russian naval vessel left port. “We need your support, sometimes even greater support now that the future seems more secure and less dramatic.”

After the Baltics regained independence from a collapsing Soviet Union three years ago, Moscow insisted on better treatment of ethnic Russians--the occupiers and their offspring who make up a third of Estonia’s and Latvia’s populations--as a condition for bringing the troops home.

Lithuania, where Russians are 9% of the population, imposed no restrictions on citizenship, and the last troops left a year ago. Prodded by President Clinton and European leaders, Estonia and Latvia brought their citizenship laws into line with international norms and agreed to let thousands of retired Soviet officers stay.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, bowing to the same Western pressure, ordered the troops out Wednesday. But not before he signed a decree formalizing the Kremlin’s role as self-appointed guardian of 25 million ethnic Russians scattered across the former Soviet empire.

In explaining the decree, Russian officials say they still regard the Estonian and Latvian citizenship laws as too restrictive--naturalization of Latvia’s half a million non-citizens, for example, will be spread over nine years--and intend to apply economic pressure to change them.

“There are lots of options,” Alexander Udaltsov, a Russian Foreign Ministry official, said in a telephone interview Thursday. “It is no secret that most of the cargo transferred through the Baltics is destined for Russia. By choosing which ports the cargoes go through, we can make these countries take notice.”

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Moscow is already withholding promised trade preferences that would boost Latvia’s and Estonia’s exports to Russia. And Latvian President Guntis Ulmanis said the Russians have hinted recently at cutting back supplies of natural gas--a weapon used against the Baltics in winters past.

Lithuania is also being denied most-favored-nation trading status, for a different reason. Russia wants to make permanent its temporary right to move military equipment and personnel across Lithuania for a major buildup in the Russian Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad.

Reluctant to accept the loss of its empire, Russia plays big-stick politics with all its neighbors, and so far the Baltics have outdone the others in asserting their independence. They have created stable currencies and dynamic private sectors, kept inflation low and attracted foreign investors.

But there are important differences among the three nations that will bear on how successfully they deal with Russia in the post-occupation era.

Lithuania, the slowest to reform, clings to government subsidies for producers. Its economy is more dependent on agricultural exports and has few markets outside Russia. Latvia and Estonia have pushed economic reform more consistently--at the cost of bankruptcies and unemployment.

While Latvia’s industry is heavier and tied to Russia’s, Estonia’s is geared to electronics and is more competitive globally. Just 18% of Estonia’s trade is with the former Soviet Union, compared with 60% of Latvia’s and 80% of Lithuania’s. Estonia has broken its dependence on Russian fuel; its neighbors depend on subsidized Russian gas.

With an economy expected to grow 7% this year, Estonia can afford to challenge Moscow more aggressively. In the spring, it pulled the plug on Russia’s Ostankino television network--a prime source of Russian propaganda that offends the Baltics--for falling behind in rebroadcast fees. And Estonia is pressing its claim to disputed border territory, despite Russia’s refusal to negotiate.

Latvia also has a border quarrel with Russia but is taking a different approach. “We have to be active in our foreign policy without creating any conflicts,” Ulmanis said.

All three countries have signed free-trade agreements with the European Union and expect to gain associate membership soon. They have joined NATO’s “Partnership for Peace” program and are forming a joint military battalion for U.N. peacekeeping duties.

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Meeting with the three Baltic presidents here in July, President Clinton agreed to set up a $50-million American Enterprise Fund to promote U.S. trade and investment in the region.

“Latvia isn’t a lonely country anymore,” said Lija Busa, 66, who was deported from Latvia at age 12 and spent 16 years in a Soviet labor camp. “It is joining the world.”

But as the troops left, Baltic leaders said they feared that the West might not be so attentive to new pressures, including activism by paramilitary groups of retired Soviet officers and organized crime by mafia gangs linked to Russian intelligence services.

Presidents Ulmanis and Meri put high priority on keeping peace with ethnic Russians. But ultimately, they say, the fate of their countries depends on an unpredictable Russia, where ultranationalists like Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky speak of reabsorbing the Baltic lands.

“They are small countries on the edge of a very large one, and they’re never going to be as totally independent as their nationalists like to believe or as Russians fear,” said Paul A. Goble, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “They are always going to be heavily influenced by their eastern neighbor.”

Times special correspondent Matt Bivens in Tallinn, Estonia, and Steven Gutterman of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.