Leningrad Welcomes L.A. as Sister City and Mentor : Government: Mayor Bradley is greeted with requests for political and economic guidance from his reform-minded Soviet counterpart.

With a sly smile, Leningrad Mayor Anatoly A. Sobchak divulged on Wednesday the reason for his great interest in having Los Angeles as a sister city: He wants to learn the secret of California’s economic success and copy it.

Mayor Tom Bradley headed a delegation of Los Angeles politicians and business people to the second-largest Soviet city this week to discover ways to participate in the economic and political renewal of Leningrad, Los Angeles’ 17th sister city.

But before the delegation arrived, Leningrad’s progressive mayor already had big plans for its new sibling city.

“We want to learn the secret to the incredibly fast-paced economic development in California over the last 10 years,” Sobchak said. “That’s why we wanted to start a sister city relationship with Los Angeles.”

Sobchak is not the only Leningrad resident looking expectantly toward Los Angeles for economic guidance and support.

The city’s Union of Cooperatives, or private businesses, had an ambitious request of its own. Vitaly N. Lukyaigenko, president of the union representing 8,000 cooperatives, asked for donations of used machinery from Los Angeles firms that are retooling their factories with new equipment.

“We have a lot of people who want to work, but we don’t have machinery,” Lukyaigenko said. “We can’t feed our people because the food we grow spoils before it gets to the store. We don’t have proper food processing or packaging equipment.”

Bradley did not give the president of the cooperatives union an immediate answer, but he did have a quick response for Sobchak.

The Los Angeles mayor unveiled a program to provide specialists to help reform the city government, which is bogged down with inefficient bureaucracy left over from decades of Communist Party control.

“We are ready to welcome American specialists,” Sobchak said, “especially economists who specialize in organization. This is one of our biggest problems and American specialists in planning and organizations have no rivals anywhere.”

Bradley’s idea is to encourage specialists in everything from management to road repairs to travel to Leningrad and help revamp the economy, while staying on the city payroll. He also plans to ask retired government managers to volunteer to work in Leningrad. In return, Leningrad would pay living expenses.

“The sister city program comes at a very historic time,” Bradley said. “There is so much happening in the Soviet Union and there is such an eagerness to be successful in reforming the economy. We want to be part of these historic changes.”

At Los Angeles’ City Hall, Bradley spokesman Bill Chandler said Wednesday that the mayor had been formulating a broad proposal to assist Soviet cities since last spring. Initially, Bradley had hoped to offer aid to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev during his springtime visit to the United States, but a meeting could not be arranged.

The proposal then under discussion called for a core of volunteers from the public and private sectors and included the accounting, engineering, medical and legal professions, he said.

Details of how the Leningrad program would be financed and how many city workers would participate have not been made final, Chandler said.

In the past, Bradley has dispatched city workers to assist in recovery from natural disasters, such as the Bay Area earthquake last year, but the scope of the assistance offered on Wednesday apparently is unprecedented.

Bradley said that, in his opinion, Los Angeles was lucky to win Leningrad as its Soviet sister city.

“Every major city in the United States wanted Leningrad because it is world famous for its culture and beauty,” he said.

Los Angeles and Leningrad were a natural match, the mayors of the two cities agreed as they toasted each other with champagne at a reception here Wednesday evening. Both are cultural centers, both are the second-largest cities in their countries and both have large ports.

But while Los Angeles is a high-tech center, Leningrad is a crumbling masterpiece, a shadow of the city it once was.

Although shipping is an obvious pet industry for the city on the Neva, the average age of Baltic Shipping Co. vessels is 18 years, compared with 7 years for a modern shipping fleet.

Los Angeles is a consumer center with shopping malls galore, but Leningrad is having more and more trouble just feeding its people.

“What has especially struck me is the number of lines--long, long lines,” said Bradley, who had last visited Leningrad in 1975. “One line for cigarettes, one for meat, another for bread and another for carrots.”

But Bradley said the most significant change in Leningrad since his visit 15 years ago was not the economic disintegration.

“The biggest change was in the attitudes of the people with respect to political change, openness to new ideas and economic reform.”

Times staff writer Jane Fritsch contributed to this story.