Not long ago, when the former Soviet Union was still the Soviet Union, Russians used the word "speculator" as an insult and the state sent currency traders to jail.


Bella Zlatkis, 45, who has headed the Finance Ministry's public securities and financial markets department for six years, remembers those days well.


"In 1990, almost nobody in Russia, maybe a handful of people, knew what a financial market was," she said. "And in the ministry, nobody knew."


But in late 1992, Zlatkis made a few notes at her desk that grew into the Russian government's first short-term treasury bill auction, designed to help the government finance its budget deficit without fueling inflation.


"At this very desk I sat down and wrote out three pages, then I brought them to Dmitry Tulin, deputy chairman of the Central Bank," she said. "He looked them over, then said, 'This is a revolution in finance.'


"We had to enlist the help of commercial organizations, because neither the Finance Ministry nor the Central Bank had the money to set up the necessary infrastructure, the computer technology."


They ultimately settled on the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange as a venue, and the treasury bill program took off. Monthly auctions have grown from 1 billion rubles in May 1993 to 100 billion rubles ($59 million) at the tenth auction in February, and Zlatkis is planning a 200 billion ruble auction for the middle of this month.


The success has not come without sacrifice. Zlatkis works from about 9 A.M. to 9 P.M. on weekdays, 10 A.M. to 7 P.M. on Saturdays and occasionally on Sundays, leaving little time for her husband and 10-year-old daughter. She has none of the perks usually associated with top bureaucrats: she answers her own phone, takes the metro to work and lives in a small apartment in northwest Moscow.


Although Zlatkis commands a team of 44 at the Finance Ministry, overseeing all government securities emissions, licensing all lotteries, exchanges and other non-bank financial institutions, and helping regulate Russia's privatization program, her home life differs little from that of most Russian families.


"We have a completely normal relationship," she said. "That is, the woman deals with the kitchen and bringing up the child while the man deals with the car and the dacha."


Being a woman in Zlatkis' position is not uncommon at the ministry; she estimates that women occupy about 70 percent of the posts in her department.


"Men, as a rule, work in banks and commercial organizations where they can make more money," she said. "My deputies, both men, have already left."


In the time since Finance Minister Boris Fyodorov resigned in January and the new conservative government was formed, Zlatkis herself has considered leaving the public sector for a more lucrative job.


"Right now is the hardest time of all," she said. "When I talk to people like Sergei Dubinin," the acting finance minister, "whom I have known for many years, or his deputy Andrei Kozmin, who once worked for me as a consultant," she said, "it seems to me that everything will work out, but when I meet with the industrial lobbyists, everything seems much more complicated."


But Zlatkis has a lesson for the lobbyists: The Finance Ministry will issue about 1 trillion rubles in one-year treasury bonds this month to pay off part of the government's 4.5-trillion-ruble debt to industry.


She said that the bonds will not only help the government curb inflation by lessening the need to print money, but will "teach enterprises and organizations to work with financial instruments."


With such challenging work ahead, Zlatkis does not feel ready to quit.


"As much as I might complain, saying how I'm sick and tired of this work and how difficult it is, I actually am glad to come to work every day and do what I do with great pleasure," she said.


"All that we have created here at the Finance Ministry was achieved only through great effort. I relate to this as if it were my own child.


"So far my child is just finding his legs, and I cannot leave him alone."