Minnesotans Scramble for Chance to Meet Gorbachev : Summit: The Soviet leader will make a brief stop during his trip to the United States. Many wonder how it will affect state politics and industry.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s surprise decision to visit Minnesota next month has touched off frantic scrambling by Minnesotans eager to meet the Soviet president and extravagant speculation about the visit’s significance to the heartland state.

“There have been hundreds of phone calls,” said David H. Speer, Minnesota commissioner for trade and economic development, who is helping to arrange the visit. “Everyone wants to meet him and everybody has a special reason why he should visit them or deal with their concept or idea. . . . Everything that you can imagine has been proposed.”

Although state officials and some of Minnesota’s top business leaders had been lobbying for a Gorbachev visit since February, they were “startled” when they received word on Monday--via television news--that he was going to come, Speer said.

“It came as a sudden shock that he had apparently made a decision to go beyond Washington,” the commissioner said. Soviet officials previously had said Gorbachev would return to Moscow immediately after completing summit talks with President Bush.

Gov. Rudy Perpich invited Gorbachev in a letter hand-delivered to the Soviet Embassy on Feb. 26. Lauding the state’s computer, microelectronics and food processing industries, medical technology and agriculture, he suggested that the Soviet leader might deliver a major address in the state on “technological cooperation for protection of the environment.” He also offered to arrange a meeting between Gorbachev and Minnesota business leaders interested in developing ties with the Soviet Union.

“We even have a town called Moscow in Minnesota,” the governor wrote.

Known as “Gov. Goofy” in the state because of his sometimes off-putting eccentricities, Perpich is seeking an unprecedented fourth term in office. He has been sinking in the polls, however, and it is not certain that he will win the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party endorsement. The Gorbachev visit is being viewed as a political godsend for him.

“We all know about the Gov. Goofy thing, and the letter to Gorbachev was seen as just another one of those goofy things that the governor does,” said D. J. Leary, a prominent Minnesota political consultant for both Republicans and Democrats. “But now, of course, he looks brilliant. The man has a horseshoe in his back pocket. The Republicans are going nuts.”

The Democratic Party’s state convention will be held just five days after Gorbachev’s visit.

David Jennings, a former state senator and a prominent Republican, said the visit “obviously will have some positive effect for the governor and may ease some of his tensions with the Democrats at the convention. But I don’t think the average voter will be overwhelmed in his favor unless, at the conclusion of the visit, he and Gorby announce a new arms control agreement.”

Major industries in Minnesota, such as Control Data, a computer firm for which Perpich once worked, have had business relationships with the Soviets for more than 20 years.

Perpich traveled to the Soviet Union when he was a trade representative for Control Data in Eastern Europe from 1979 to 1982, and he led trade missions to the Soviet Union in 1983 and 1984.

“We’re much less insular than we used to be,” Speer said of the state’s business community. “We’re starting to become a real player in international commerce.”

The existence of 33 joint ventures in the Soviet Union involving Minnesota companies, plus the state’s high-pressure lobbying campaign, are believed to have contributed to the Soviet acceptance of Perpich’s invitation.

Beyond that, though, Gorbachev apparently decided to visit Minnesota because he wanted to have “an American heartland experience” similar to the one Nikita S. Khrushchev had in 1959 when he visited an Iowa cornfield, said Richard Bohr, executive director of the Minnesota Office of Trade.

As part of Perpich’s “full court press” to persuade Gorbachev to visit the state, officials invited Soviet filmmaker Oleg Uralov to visit Minnesota when he came to the United States in March to attend the Academy Awards.

Uralov, who is filming a biography of Gorbachev, is acquainted with the Soviet president and made a personal appeal on behalf of Perpich when he returned to Moscow, Bohr said.

Gorbachev will visit the state for only six hours on June 3. State officials have submitted a list of suggestions to the Soviet Embassy, including proposals that Gorbachev deliver a speech from the Capitol steps in St. Paul, pay a visit to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester or travel to a farm.

Free-lance writer P. J. Rader in Minneapolis contributed to this story.