While barter trade -- swapping shares for shares -- might boost market activity, traders said foreign investors who control the market would find such trade outrageous.

"There is nothing attractive for Western investors in such a scheme. The practice doesn't exist anywhere in the world and explaining it to clients would be preposterous," said a senior operator at one large brokerage.

Barter share trade was suggested by an official of the Russian Trading System more than a week ago as one way to increase activity on a market that has lost some 90 per cent of its value since the beginning of the year.

Officials for the RTS, an over-the-counter style market which is Russia's biggest, said barter deals were already taking place outside their market for shares of companies such as LUKoil, National energy firm Unified Energy System (UES) and theSaint Petersburg milk company Roska.

Barter may be the major form of trade in Russia's cash-poor real economy among companies struggling through the crisis.

"The main thing is that this doesn't become a substitute for the market," said one share trader. "So that sometime in the future we don't wind up seeing something on RTS like people announcing `will trade or sell shares of UES for LUKoil.'"

A spokesman for RTS said the proposal was not formal.

"It is a completely raw idea. We pitched it out onto the Internet and (the result was) telephone calls and questions," he said.

RTS officials said they were not convinced that introducing barter trade was needed or even practical, but suggested it could trigger activity among small- and medium-sized brokerages stuck holding illiquid shares after the market plunged.

Almost no shares now trade, with the occasional exception of small lots of leading shares such as LUKoil and UES.

While some scoffed at the idea, a few traders said the plan could bepractical.

"The amounts involved in such situations could be processed like mutual debt cancellation," said Centre Invest Securities trader Yuri Timoshchenko.

Potential users of barter trade said deals could be of interest to strategic investors wishing to change positions without investing new funds.

"Everything has become outrageously cheap and it would be easy to gain control of an enterprise sufficiently healthy to survive any conditions," said one trader.