Soviet Bankers Explore American Capitalism : Education: Program teaches entrepreneurial skills to Russian businessmen who then put their new-found knowledge to work in meetings with New York’s financial and banking community elite.

Boy, how times have changed.

Dr. Alexander Medvedev, citizen of the Soviet Union, graduate of the Moscow Physical Technical Institute and member of the newly evolving Soviet business elite, is surveying the rush hour traffic on Park Avenue in the heart of corporate New York and making a joke in public that only a couple of years ago might have earned the Soviet banker an express ticket to Siberia.

“What’s the only difference between Hungary, Romania and the United States?” he asks with a mischievous smile. “United States is the only country with a Communist Party.”

While Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev copes with seemingly endless domestic disputes, charts new relationships with the West and the re-revolutionized Eastern Bloc and attempts to build a new social structure for his country, Medvedev and a few others like him are attempting to make up for spending 72 years outside the capitalist mainstream.

Medvedev and Erich Spahn, an Austrian co-worker at the Donau-Bank, a state-owned Soviet international trade bank based in Vienna, just finished a nearly one-month stint in the United States. First, they attended a special program in Wichita, Kan., learning entrepreneurial skills and the ways of American capitalism, and then spent five days where they attempted to put that knowledge to work in meetings with New York’s financial and banking community elite.

“We definitely gained business contacts and ideas for educational programs for Soviet teams, to build the skills that are probably non-existent,” Medvedev says of the experience, something of an eye-opener even for a Soviet citizen living in Vienna.

“The industrial situation and social situation (in the United States),” marvels Medvedev, “gives local people a lot of possibilities to start up businesses.”

The three-week Wichita program, created by Fran Jabara, former dean of the College of Business Administration at Wichita State University, was a mix of academic and pragmatic instruction, according to Jabara. Medvedev and Spahn, who both speak English well, attended formal lectures at Wichita State and Friends University, also in Wichita, and three all-day seminars on marketing, management and leadership. In addition they met with senior executives from 35 companies based in and around the Wichita area, including Pizza Hut Inc. and Beech Aircraft Corp.

Comparing the Soviets to their American counterparts, Jabara says: “They don’t think a lot about marketing, advertising and sales promotion. Their biggest problem is productivity; things that are taken for granted here.”

Though the program by all accounts was a morning-till-night affair, Medvedev, Spahn and two other Russian bankers in the program managed, at least one evening, to see a different side of America: Jabara wangled guest passes to the Miss USA pageant, staged in Wichita.

In New York, Medvedev, who is executive manager for Donau-Bank’s mergers and acquisitions department, and Spahn, manager of the bank’s loan department, have met with senior executives from Chase Manhattan Bank, Citicorp and Bear, Stearns & Co., among others, to “improve relationships, find new partners and generate new projects.”

The Donau-Bank, which has a U.S. office in New York, was formed in 1974 as a roughly 50-50 joint venture between two Soviet state-owned banks, Gosbank and the Bank for Foreign Economic affairs; it finances East-West trade and cooperation, according to Medvedev. It is said to have approximately $1.5 billion in assets--all of it in hard, Western currency.

But it apparently will take more than cash and good intentions to attract the U.S. financial community. “From an investor’s standpoint, instability is the overriding issue,” says Keith Norman, a credit analyst with Goldman Sachs & Co., and co-author of an internal memorandum on Eastern Europe.