Russia's exports showed strong growth last year, increasing by 8.4 percent and notching up a $19.8 billion trade surplus with the rest of the world, according to new statistics reported by Interfax on Monday.


Russia's foreign trade collapsed after the breakup of the Soviet Union 1991 but has shown a steady recovery since then. Economists say, however, that official figures have exaggerated the extent of the decline.


Data released by the State Statistics Committee showed that increased trade with the West accounted for more than two-thirds of the growth in exports, while trade with Russia's old Soviet bloc and Third World partners continued to decline.


Imports were up for the first time since 1991, rising by 5.2 percent in 1994, with goods from industrialized countries again accounting for the lion's share of the increase. But imports from other countries of the former Soviet Union and the Third World fell by 4 percent and 2.5 percent respectively.


Economists said Monday, however, that as much as $8 billion worth of imports went unrecorded, eating into Russia's trade surplus.


"There may have been $28 billion of official imports (in 1994), but there was probably $8 billion of unofficial imports," said Yelena Ishchenko, director of foreign trade analysis at the Center of Economic Analysis and Forecast. Around $1 billion of this seeped in from other former Soviet republics and China, she said, referring to Russia's former rival for hegemony in the communist world as "that criminal zone."


A Moscow-based Western economist, who declined to be named, agreed that Russian imports were probably much higher than government figures indicate, due to both smuggling and the nature of data-gathering here. The Statistics Committee's methods of collecting trade data, he said, were better suited to measuring the state rather than the private sector.


Analysts say that illegal exports, mainly of raw materials, have also gone largely unrecorded.


But while the volume of trade may have risen, Russia suffered in 1994 by a fall in the prices of key export commodities. Crude oil was down by 4 percent, natural gas by 6 percent, and petroleum prices by 12 percent.


One bright spot, however, was aluminum, which underwent a solid 22 percent price hike last year.