MOSCOW, July 15 (AFP) - Every night at dusk, Natasha Strogonova joins the bevy of women near Moscow's Dinamo sports stadium to earn in a few hours many times more than the monthly wages she took home in her previous job as a store clerk.

"I have two children. I need money," said Strogonova, 28, who will spend six months in Moscow before returning to her home town of Ivanovo, north of the capital, and live off her earnings as a prostitute.

Moscow is struggling to cope with pervasive street prostitution -- perhaps the worst in eastern Europe -- and officials acknowledge the problem is probably here to stay.

As many as 60,000 women work in the sex trade in Moscow, most of whom arrive from outlying Russian regions and former Soviet republics, according to Viktor Yegorin, who heads a Moscow unit of the interior ministry formed two years ago to tackle the prostitution boom.

Lured by the prospect of higher earnings, tens of thousands of women converge on Moscow where living standards continue to far outrank those of Russians in the regions, despite last August's financial crash.

In Ivanovo, Natasha earned 500 roubles a month (25 dollars), a pittance compared to the 25,000 roubles she is paid for performing sexual acts in Moscow.

While some prostitutes work in hotels and escort services, most of them walk the streets, or rather gather at designated "tochki" (points) in the city in organised groups protected by bodyguards.

"Why do we have so many prostitutes ? Because our country is in a state of economic collapse," Yegorin said in an interview this week from his office near Red Square.

"As long as that issue is not being addressed, it will be very difficult to talk about solving Moscow's prostitution problem."

A 1997 study by the US human rights group Global Survival Network singled out Moscow as a hub of the eastern European sex trade, which has supplied women to prostitution rings in Germany, Poland, Japan and Macau.

Moscow police have recently clamped down on prostitution on Tverskaya street, the capital's main thoroughfare, where women once crowded the sidewalks, drawing complaints that the city center had become a public brothrel.

The women were pushed further north near Dinamo where Natasha now works while others have moved to the train stations.

"We are gradually trying to gain control of the situation," Yegorin said.

But he admitted that the efforts of his 10-man unit are often undermined by police who act as accomplices, helping the women obtain residence permits and carry out their business in exchange for bribes.

While Muscovites complain loudly about the street prostitutes who have moved into residential areas, politicians have stayed clear of the issue, perhaps sensing that they cannot promise solutions.

"We will not be able to escape this," warned Emma Safarova, the head physician at the Sana health center which has started an outreach project to help the women. "If we put them on a train, they will just come back."

Since May, the Sana center is offering free health care to the women, who are among high risk groups for HIV infection and for other sexually-transmitted diseases.

The program, funded by the Russian health ministry, is keeping up-to-date information on the prostitutes through surveys and offers counselling to help them protect themselves.

It also produced a brochure this year titled "How to safely engage in sex and sex business" that caused a stir for its pragmatic advice to prostitutes about condoms and dealing with clients.

Safarova contends that authorities must resist the temptation of driving street prostitutes into the jaws of Moscow's burgeoning criminal underworld where they will be beyond reach.

"Hopefully, prostitution will only be a short episode in these women's lives," she said.

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