The Federal Border Service occupies the offices of its Soviet predecessor, but, unlike the former division of the KGB, the new agency says it intends to avoid surrounding the country with barbed wired fences wherever possible.


After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia has faced the task of protecting a 60,000-kilometer border, only 10,000 kilometers of which is the old Iron Curtain inherited from the Soviet Union. The left-over border sections are heavily patroled and shield Russian territory against incursions from Norway, Finland, Poland, Mongolia, China and Korea.


By contrast, Russia and the newly independent Baltic States were until quite recently separated by nothing but open fields. But the border service is changing that fast.


The amount of attempted smuggling involving non-ferrous metals and arms intercepted at the frontier with Estonia and Latvia in the first six months of this year accounted for more than a quarter of all contraband seized on Russia's borders, according to the press office of the Federal Border Service.


The high smuggling rate has forced the government to seal off the border and deploy frontier troops along the demarcation line even though it is still disputed by Latvia and Estonia, said Anatoly Prokopyev, a spokesman for the service.


The service's strategy is to police Russia's vast stretches of open borders only as this proves necessary.


"The border service has adopted a policy of responding to specific circumstances at the borders rather than taking preventive measures," Prokopyev said.


As a result there are customs checkpoints on roads crossing the Ukrainian border, but no attempt to patrol the frontier. Yet in the unruly Caucasus, circumstances have already forced the service to deploy troops along the borders.


The border with Azerbaijan was until recently easily crossed by drug traffickers traveling from Iran across a frontier that Azerbaijan appears reluctant or unable to seal off, Prokopyev said.


As a result, he said Russia had deployed some troops along its border with Azerbaijan but had not yet sealed it off because the hope remains that Baku will let Russian soldiers man the former Soviet borders with Iran and Turkey.


Were Baku to agree, the troops now stationed along the Azerbaijani-Russian border would be unnecessary.


At a recent session of Russia's Security Council, the commander of the border guards, Andrei Nikolayev, said the agency's priority was to secure Russia's frontiers by negotiations with its neighbors rather than by technical means, such as fences and fortifications.


Several ex-Soviet republics, like Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, have already agreed to allow Russian troops to patrol their outside borders, while others, like Belarus and Ukraine guarantee effective protection with their own forces, Prokopyev said.


Although smuggling is also high between Russia and its CIS neighbors, whose economies are in an even worse shape than Russia's, the service prefers cooperation with the national security agencies rather than erecting fences along lines that used to exist only on maps.


All sides would benefit from this approach, Nikolayev said, adding that the cost of installing one kilometer of fully fledged border equipment and deploying the necessary troops amounted to about 1 billion rubles ($500,000).