CHIGDOMIN, Siberia -- For years North Korea's "labor army" toiled in the remote vastness of Siberia in what was billed as a triumph of communist cooperation between fraternal states.


Now the once-booming lumber venture is in trouble, victim of the political split between Moscow and Pyongyang. The archipelago of logging camps faces an uncertain future.


The joint venture in the Badzharsky mountains of Siberia once employed up to 30,000 North Koreans and brought in the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars a year.


Moscow and Pyongyang were close allies; neither politics nor economics intruded. But the rot set in with the advent of former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.


As Russia embraced the old foe, capitalism, North Korea retreated even further into Stalinist isolationism. The contradictions of tightly controlled communist labor in frenetically free-market Russia are all too obvious.


Rolling hills dense with fir and birch forest stretch for hundreds of kilometers. A trip up the narrow dirt roads which lead into the expanse of trees, reveals the remains of logging sites, barren hillsides where only shale rock remains, or flatlands scattered with logging refuse.


With sun-blackened faces, sinewy men in white shirts and blue trousers wander down the road near a main base camp. Slogans in Korean characters stand out in white paint against a red, two-meter wooden fence.


For the last 27 years the Soviet Union and then Russia contracted out virgin forests to the North Korean Number 1 Lumber Company, supplying machinery and fuel, in exchange for a little more than half of the wood harvest.


The 10,000 Koreans working on three-year contracts in the "Labor Army" remain in a string of hamlets and logging camps 500 kilometers northwest of Khabarovsk. A meager stipend and food and clothes from the motherland provide modest support.


The tactical problems of receding forests, outdated equipment and habitually late food supplies from North Korea are compounded by an ideologically unsympathetic Moscow pressuring the local government to find someone else to cut the trees.


"Moscow ordered us to stop dealing with the Koreans by January 1 of this year. A letter came from Prime Minister (Viktor) Chernomyrdin shortly after Yeltsin met the South Korean president in Seoul," last year, says Valery Suknovalenka, General Director of the Urgal Foresting Company.


"I argued that we are profitable, so they let us continue working. But last year they taxed us more heavily than ever. We kept 3 kopecks per ruble (3 percent). That is what we have to reinvest in new equipment," said Suknovalenko.


The camps around Chigdomin are sleepy now. The late Kim Il-Sung's portrait looks down on an almost deserted complex of wooden buildings, barracks, a dining room, a cinema.


Up the road, a few men work cutting logs to length on a conveyor belt, and a crane loads them onto railway cars. In town, where the Korean administration headquarters are located, the Koreans saunter down the main street or browse in shops and the open market.


According to the Russian local government Chief Administrator, Pyotr Titkov, most of them have gone home on their annual holidays, and those who remain are concentrated at least 40 kilometers away in the choice logging country.


Only 300 of the local Russian inhabitants of Chigdomin work in the forestry joint venture. Most Russians work in the coal mines and rail yards and seem untouched by the Korean presence.


The local authorities and Russian partners are less than happy to see journalists arrive. They complain of a Cold War grudge against the Koreans because they are Communists. Problems with Moscow, they say, began with the arrival of the first foreign journalists.


Critical reports by the press have aimed at civil rights questions, noting the authoritarian strictness of the camps, guarded by North Korean police, as well taking issue with the fact that Koreans are not allowed to travel outside the region without special documents granted by the company.


Concerns have also been raised about heavy erosion in some areas caused by logging.


The future of the North Koreans in the region depends on their ability to accept a lesser share of the profits, and meet demands for tougher ecological standards, as written in the revised contract up for renewal on Sept.1.


According to regional administrator Titkov, the most important part of the agreement negotiated in Pyongyang in June required that 72 percent of wood goes to Russia as opposed to 57 percent in the past. The second major point requires reseeding of forested lands.


The local government has received another letter from Russia's Foreign Ministry, saying Moscow will honor the contract only if the Koreans remove their police force and that Koreans working in Russia are allowed free travel.


Suknovalenko argues that in a free market Russia, the Koreans are the best deal for cheap labor and that if they go, the region will suffer. "Russians don't want to work the logging camps for what we will pay," he said.