MOSCOW -- Out by train. Of all the ways to leave Russia, it may be the finest. Not giddily luxurious. Not an adventure. Certainly not fast. But a perfect blend of time and Russian-ness.

The airport is a nightmare, and upon boarding a plane you're instantly in the land of Boeing. Highways are unthinkable. There's the sea, perhaps, but that's for another time.

No. Let us begin at Moscow's Leningradsky Station, and the 18 dull-green cars of the Lev Tolstoy train to Helsinki, Finland, stretching down the platform and into the night.

The two at the far end are ours: "business class" cars, retrofitted to look like the kinds of cars commissars must once have ridden, full of dark wood, brownish overstuffed chairs, dim brass lighting fixtures, an Oriental carpet on the floor. Five compartments, two passengers each.

They speak to something -- is it nostalgia, or a hazy image of the way the Soviet Union once provided for its privileged class, the "nomenklatura"? The cars are not gaudy or even elegant, but they stand out in a deeply Russian sort of way. There's something about them, a sadness you can almost savor, and perhaps that's the point.

First, though, the station. We gather at 10 p.m., two American families in search of a getaway. From the broad plaza fronted by three of the great stations of Moscow -- the Kazansky, with trains for the Volga; the Yaroslavsky, where the Trans-Siberian sets out; and the Leningradsky, the oldest -- we ascend a broad set of steps and enter through the portico of the classical yellow and white-trimmed terminal, built in 1851 as the Nikolayevsky Station.

To the outer world, the station presents an appropriately imperial aspect, built as it was during the reign of Nicholas I and as an expression of the railroad linking St. Petersburg and Moscow, the two great capitals of the Eurasian Russian Empire. Five steps past the front door, though, and we've left the royal facade behind. It's a shell, a Potemkin Village of a train station.

The real business takes place in a dim hall built in Soviet times, dominated by a giant bust of V. I. Lenin, who founded a new empire out of the ashes of the old, but had to move his capital hurriedly to Moscow with the outbreak of civil war. Here -- right here at this station -- is where Lenin arrived with his government in 1918, and no one should forget it. That's what this hall says. You look up at his bust and a diamond-patterned optically difficult ceiling makes the world start to spin -- but it's spinning around Lenin himself, which is only proper even if Leninism is dead and buried.

Moscow stations are always bustling, though most of the life is outdoors, in the alleyways and on the apron leading to the platforms. Soldiers, beggars, musicians, vendors, pickpockets, traders lugging heavy bundles of Turkish clothing jostling with fishermen and their creels -- all headed somewhere, sometime. An accordion plays and meat spits on a grill, and a just-arrived family of rubes from Murmansk stares in apprehension and delight.

From the sleeping cars awaiting their passengers comes the sweet smell of coal smoke, wafting from the samovars that in the course of the impending journey will keep up an endless supply of hot water and tea for weary train-trapped riders.

Memory takes us back to an earlier departure from Moscow, one that we then thought would be final. After four years in Russia, we were moving back to America. Our friends gathered on the platform, we popped champagne and cried, the train finally pulling out as we waved mournfully out the windows. No one cries or drinks champagne or moves back and forth off the plane at the airport; you're on one side, then you're on the other. There's no buffer, there's no summing up. For that you need a train.

But that was more than three years ago and it proved to be a false goodbye, because here we are living in Moscow again. The Lev Tolstoy beckons with nothing more meaningful than a weekend in Helsinki. We bound onto the train, break out the snacks, pop open a couple of bottles of Czech beer from the nicely appointed little bar at one end of the car.

At 10:30, we slip off into the night, the retro-comfort of our circumstances a welcome contrast to the harshly lighted concrete junk out the window that is one of the realities of the Russian landscape. For a long time, our train slowly clacks through Moscow and its ragged suburbs, and we happily retreat into our coziness and good cheer.

Legend has it that the engineers who planned the railroad linking St. Petersburg and Moscow brought a map to the czar to show him possible routes, whereupon he took out a ruler and drew a straight line between the two cities, with a slight jag halfway along where he nicked his thumb with the pencil.

Look at a map of Russia today and you'll see that the rail line is indeed nearly straight, with a small bulge of a curve about midway along.

Historians say it's just a legend, but it's one that accords with people's notions of life under an emperor. The land itself will bend to his will. And a mighty railroad will detour around his thumbprint so that no one would seem to be questioning his judgment. (There's a similar story told about Stalin and an asymmetrical hotel just off Red Square.) You might be awed as a passenger at such an expression of autocratic rule, but because the tracks are straight it's easier to sleep.

At midnight, we arrive at the old station in Tver. No one seems to be around. How often are the inhabitants of Tver called away to Helsinki on business or pleasure? The schedule calls for a 20-minute stop -- in a land as big as Russia, hurrying isn't going to make much difference -- and for 20 minutes we sit in unbroken serenity.

We retreat to our berths. The night passes. We skirt St. Petersburg, greet the dawn at Vyborg, enter a land of snowy swamps. At the border stands a shiny new building, looking like a suburban corporate headquarters for a particularly smug and profitable company. It looks nothing like the beat-up old buildings we've been passing. It's new since the last time we passed this way, an astonishing sight in a country still as poor as Russia is. We learn that it houses the regional offices of Russian customs.

The border crossing is languid yet businesslike. The Russians are good-natured; the Finns correct. We remember our last visit here, when a passing shower gave way to a magnificent rainbow that looked like the gate to Russia, the Russia that we were leaving behind.

Now three years later, the ruble has fallen and the economy has collapsed, and one of the reasons we're taking this trip is to escape, if only briefly, the dreary cynicism and hopelessness of today's Russia. Here we are on this somberly delightful train, a little piece of Russia carrying the Russian paradox into the West.

In Finland, we pick up speed, passing Volvos and wooden houses that let us know we have crossed from Slavic to Scandinavian. We breakfast on unexpectedly satisfying omelets cooked fresh to our order as northern farm fields slip by.

In the early afternoon, 18 hours since departure, we pull into Helsinki. When Russia took Finland from Sweden at the close of the Napoleonic wars, it established Helsinki as the new capital of the Grand Duchy. A German architect, Carl Engel, laid out impressive squares, creating a noble city on the Baltic.

But the Finns are a cantankerous people, and, by the turn of the century, favor had turned to an emphasis on the national rather than the imperial. Finns began to treasure what was Finnish; the composer Sibelius flourished, as did the architect Eliel Saarinen. It was Saarinen who designed Helsinki's train station in 1919, Finland's first year of independence from Russia.

We walk from the Lev Tolstoy into one of the truly great examples of early 20th century architecture. It could hardly be more of a contrast to the royal image and Soviet reality of Leningradsky Station, back in Moscow. It speaks of solidity, and not appearances. It speaks of Finland, and the Finns. If it also bears some uncomfortable hints of the fascism that lay ahead for Europe -- that's a reminder of the ends to which nationalism can be put.

Helsinki is not a lighthearted place, although Finland's entry into the European Union after decades under the Soviet Union's watchful eye has brought new restaurants, new stores and new life. We head out under a pale white sun to our hotel. The train ride has given us a sharp sense of just how far Moscow is behind us, of what we have left and what we have come to. It has carried us from one mood to another. Late in the day, a salty rain slants in from the sea, a Finnish counterpoint, perhaps, to the very Russian melancholy of the Lev Tolstoy.

WHEN YOU GO ...

The Lev Tolstoy travels daily between Moscow and Helsinki. "Retro-Business Class" tickets cost about $100 one way when purchased in Moscow. Two daytime trains -- one Finnish and one Russian -- travel between Helsinki and St. Petersburg.

Pub Date: 03/21/99