Thursday, December 3, 1998

By RICHARD BOUDREAUX, Times Staff Writer

The fall of the Soviet Union has left the inhabitants of the subarctic region and Siberia hungry, cold and afraid of ouster.
      The story of a gold-mining settlement, from its pioneer origin 35 years ago to its near-certain demise, is a pitiful epitaph for Moscow's campaign to conquer the vast, hostile northern region. After more than a century of northward colonization, under czars and Central Committees, Russia is in painful, disorderly retreat.
      Nearly 1 million settlers have migrated south since the Soviet Union's breakup shrank the subsidy that once guaranteed them high wages, abundant supplies and low prices in thousands of remote northern communities now too costly to maintain.
      That leaves 11.9 million people in what Moscow loosely defines as "the North"--the Arctic regions of European Russia and everything east of the Ural Mountains. Many of these people barely work and rarely get paid; being too poor to leave or having nowhere to go, they have survived the past seven winters on Moscow's meager, erratic allotments of food and fuel.