By Judith Ingram

        Crowds of sweaty men in shirt sleeves, toting briefcases, gym bags and cell phones, rush down the railroad platform as a lumbering locomotive drags their homebound train into a Moscow station on a stiflingly hot Friday night.

    They could be commuters anywhere, after a long day at the office. But these workers go home only on weekends at best, because their jobs are in Russia and their homes are far away in Ukraine.

   

"Russia has become a safety valve for the impoverished republics. "

When the Soviet Union collapsed 10 years ago, so did a web of ties developed over seven decades. Thousands of huge factories went idle after their suppliers or customers ended up across new borders, in new countries.

    Contracts evaporated and jobs disappeared. Some of the former Soviet republics started knocking on NATO's door, and their citizens, too, turned away from Russia — enrolling their children in English and German classes in hopes of a career-launching stint in the West.

    Yet today, most of the former republics remain in Russia's orbit, tied by economic and security needs, their politics and professions still dominated by leaders who were bred in the same Soviet universities, Communist Party and KGB.

    "The mentality of the ruling class is a strong binding force," said Vitaly Tretyakov, until recently the editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily.

    On the Moscow platform, smoking a cigarette, was Vladimir Nikolayevich, heading home to his wife and son in Kharkiv. Born and raised in Ukraine, his job is in Nadym, in the Far North — about 3,200 kilometers from Kharkiv.

    The sandy-haired road engineer was making the commute when Russia and Ukraine were the same country, and little has changed for him, he said, except that the 10-hour rail trip has grown to 13 hours because of restored borders and customs checks.

    Another change is that although he's an ethnic Russian, being a Ukrainian citizen makes him an alien in Russia, and he risks arrest if his work papers aren't in order. "We're somehow foreigners," he said with disbelief.

    Vladimir Nikolayevich wouldn't give his surname or reveal his income, but salaries and benefits in the Far North are much bigger than the Russian average wage of about $100 a month, and far above what he could make in Ukraine.

    Russia has become a safety valve for the impoverished republics. It has absorbed 8 million immigrants from the former republics since 1991. An additional 100,000 foreign citizens work legally in Russia, and millions more work illegally.

    They come by train and bus, fruit vendors carting juice-stained boxes of peaches and grapes, construction workers in dust-caked pants and T-shirts.

    As Russia imports labor, it continues to export influence.

    For all the flowering of national culture in the republics following independence, Russian remains the lingua franca across much of the vast territory that made up the Soviet Union, and about 25 million Russians live in the former republics — what Russians call "the Near Abroad."

    Those minorities, and Moscow's increasingly assertive defense of them, make a strong argument for sticking with Russian for transacting much official business.

    Russia's state television networks broadcast news throughout the former republics, putting a Kremlin spin on events. Their soap operas, gangster series and quiz shows have devotees far beyond Russia's borders. When Russian rock groups such as Mashina Vremeni performed in Kiev, 500,000 fans showed up.

    The Kremlin plays regional policeman, too, along the old Soviet frontiers. MiG-29 jets patrol the border between Armenia and Turkey, a NATO member, and Russian troops guard Tajikistan's volatile frontier with Afghanistan, trying to stem the flow of drugs, weapons and radical Islamic fighters.

    The former republics used to account for 54 percent of Russia's trade. Now it's just 19 percent, according to government figures, partly because of Russia's protectionist trade policies.

    But Russia remains a huge customer for goods that may not find ready markets elsewhere: produce and wine from Moldova and the Caucasus nations of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, trucks from Belarus, cotton from Central Asia.

    Russian companies have pumped more than $1.5 billion into the former republics in the past 10 years, according to official data, and have snapped up industries there, stoking nervousness among nationalists.

    Many of the former republics get their oil and natural gas from Russia. They might prefer to have other options, said Vladimir Baranovsky, of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow, but "their dependence has continued, and from that comes an economic stimulus to continue cooperation."

    Nowhere is that dependence clearer than in the economic and political union Russia has formed with Belarus, and many believe Ukraine and Moldova are next in line to join it. Communist influence is high in all three countries, and their leaders have all voiced nostalgia for Soviet times and balked at reform.

    The three also depend overwhelmingly on Russian energy shipments, and they're behind in paying their combined 53.71 billion rubles ($1.85 billion) debt to Moscow. Many Russian experts think Moscow might forgive the debts in a trade-off for creating a large, Moscow-led regional community counterbalancing the United States and European Union.

    "The geostrategic gain makes up for the economic losses," Tretyakov, the editor, said.

    Conversely, the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia have been most successful in escaping Moscow's embrace. All have their sights set firmly on membership in NATO and the European Union, and their trade with Russia has plunged.

    The pattern is less clear in the Caucasus Mountains region. Russia is balking at removing its last military bases from Georgia. Moscow is accused of supporting separatist rebels there, and Moscow accuses Georgia of aiding the fighters in neighboring Chechnya whom Russia has been battling off and on for seven years. Moscow has imposed a visa requirement and occasionally suspended gas shipments — reminding Georgians that it still has the power to turn off their lights.

    Azerbaijan, a Caspian Sea country with potentially large oil and gas reserves, has managed to chart a more or less independent course. Major international oil companies have signed 21 production-sharing agreements with Azerbaijan, which could net the country some $60 billion. The nation's leading trade partner is Italy.

    "We used to have solid ties with Russia, but nobody can deny that we've done more over the past 10 years to solidify relations with the West than over 100 years with Russia," said Zardusht Ali-zade, head of Azerbaijan's Social-Democratic Party.

    Both Azerbaijan and its rival, Armenia, have to tread carefully with Moscow because they need Russian mediation in their dispute over the Nagorny Karabakh region. But Azeri President Heidar Aliyev has flirted with NATO, and his Armenian counterpart, Robert Kocharyan, said flatly his nation would never consider entering any union with Russia.

    The Central Asian states all have tried to look outward to Turkey and China, but concerns over drug trafficking, international terrorism and radical Islamic movements have drawn them back into Russia's sphere of influence.

    "No matter how much we've been pulled in different directions, we're looking for unity," said Myktybek Abdyldayev, director of Kyrgyzstan's Institute for Strategic Studies. "People are looking for a common language, and they'll find it."

    Baranovsky, the international relations expert, said the euphoria that swept the newly freed republics isn't gone.

    "They've realized miracles don't happen. Central Asian countries can't claim to have rainbows around the corner or be a new Switzerland," he said.

    "There's economic reality, geopolitical and cultural reality, and a very weighty part of that reality is that Russia is nearby and it's a country with which they need to have stable, constructive ties."

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