A Tide of Soviet Emigres Threatens to Inundate N.Y. : Immigration: 500,000 expected, with many Baltic citizens entering illegally. City services may be swamped.

Early in November, Gunnar Graps, a 38-year-old Estonian rock star whose popularity at home has waned because his lyrics no longer are radical enough for young Soviet audiences, landed here en route to Orange County, Calif., where he planned to visit his uncle.

Nearly two months later, he is still in New York and thinking of staying permanently.

Graps is one of a new breed of Soviet immigrants who are coming to the United States not to escape political and religious persecution, but, like their grandfathers in czarist times, primarily for economic reasons.

So far, the influx has attracted little attention. But, with the barriers between East and West tumbling further every day, authorities are expecting the increase in Soviet immigration--already the largest in percentage terms of any immigrant group in two decades--to surge dramatically.

Elizabeth Aivars, director of the New York Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, predicts that in the next several years no fewer than 500,000 new immigrants from the Soviet Union will flood into this city, joining the estimated 120,000 Soviet emigres now living here.

“It is going to be incredible,” she exclaimed.

Planners say that the influx is almost certain to strain New York City’s services in some neighborhoods, overloading counseling and social agencies and making jobs even harder to get.

The new emigres from the Soviet Union no longer are primarily Jewish. Baltic peoples--Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians--are coming in record numbers, often illegally, and without the support network that Jewish emigres have established.

“We used to say: ‘When will the day come that we will see our people free?’ ” said Aarand Roos, the Estonian consul here in New York. “Now it’s come, and we say: ‘Wait a minute. They’re coming too fast!’ ”

As a measure of the recent increase, two of New York’s largest banks have installed Russian-English automatic teller machines in neighborhoods frequented by the emigres, at the request of the Assn. of New Americans, the city’s largest resettlement agency.

Many young Estonians are entering the United States on the basis of counterfeit invitations--ostensibly from Estonian-Americans professing to be relatives--often purchased on the black market, typically for about three months’ salary.

But, as many immigrants have before them, they often find that life here is not as easy as they had imagined.

“They think that they are young and eager to work hard, and that is all they need,” said Justo Rusto, an Estonian-American journalist who immigrated here 50 years ago, “but they don’t realize the difficulties of getting green (alien registration) cards and finding a job.

“They have no knowledge of the Western world,” he added. “They think that this is the land of plenty and that everyone is a millionaire. Later, they will find it is not so.”

Since the Soviet Union eased its exit regulations five years ago, immigration to the United States has risen more than 60-fold, from only 600 in 1986 to more than 39,000 this year, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

More than 20,000 of these Soviet emigres have settled in New York. About 80% of those moved to Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach area, a traditional settling spot for Soviet Jews. But, as the housing there has filled up, the immigrants have moved northward to the Bronx.

The influx is helping to revitalize many old neighborhoods. Pelham Parkway in the Bronx has become one of the fastest growing Soviet Jewish communities in New York. Although real estate values elsewhere have been declining, rents in Pelham have stayed the same or even risen.

“This is one of the last affordable middle-class areas in the city,” said Nathan Kolodney, director of the Bronx House, a Jewish community center in Pelham. “The prices are cheaper because we suffer the reputation of being in the Bronx.”

Today, neighborhoods framed with Christmas lights straddle the path of the D Train, a subway line, through Brooklyn. Near Brighton Beach, now known informally as Little Odessa, electric menorahs, used to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah, light the windows.

“I love the lights,” said 14-year-old Olga, her eyes shining as she looked along Brighton’s gray boardwalk at women in traditional babushkas. “It means freedom of religion and freedom to do anything.”

Olga and her family came to the United States in September, but the teen-ager--dressed in jeans and Reeboks and toting a backpack--is already an old hand at the American way of life.

“I am too old to be President, but he --,” she laughs, taking the hand of her heavily bundled 5-year-old brother, “ he will be the first Russian-American President!”

Although resettlement agencies report that many recent emigres are disillusioned with the United States, most Soviet immigrants say they do not regret their move.

“I am sad for my past, but not (for) what I left behind,” said Yelena Katkov, a translator from Leningrad, who fled here because of fear that social disruption in the Soviet Union might lead to further violence and anti-Semitism.

Katkov said she cried recently when she went into Victor Komkin’s bookstore in Manhattan. “Here were all the books that are published in Moscow and Leningrad but you can’t buy there,” she recalled. “In New York, you can buy those books. It was a wonderful feeling.”

Many emigres notice a difference between the previous groups that have emigrated from the Soviet Union and the newer waves.

“This last group is more intellectual and generally came from a higher class than the previous ones,” the Bronx House’s Kolodney said. “They have higher-level positions and generally more to lose by leaving. But they are willing . . . they are afraid of anarchy.”

“Three years ago, we were serving about 10 families,” Kolodney said. “Today, we’re up to 300 Soviet families. It’s a tremendous financial strain, but it’s also exciting . . . . We were founded to help the first Russian immigrants . . . and now we’re doing it again.”

The rise in emigration of Armenians from their strife-torn republic--and of native Russians who are Pentecostalists--has been stunning in recent years, according to Barbara Nagorski of the International Rescue Committee, which has helped many non-Jewish Soviets.

But now the non-Jewish Soviet immigrants are mostly Baltic peoples, and the American Baltic communities are striving to cope with the financial burden.

Predictions of a rise in Jewish immigration are less dramatic, largely because Soviet Jews now are required to go directly to Israel, and about 95% of them settle there. Nonetheless, New York’s Soviet Jewish population, now 100,000, is expected to double in the next five years.

Stella Furleiter, the vice president of National Night Club in Brighton, one of the most popular Soviet nightclubs in New York, said she can easily distinguish today’s emigres from those who came to Brighton 15 years ago, when her family moved here from Odessa.

“There is a difference in taste,” she said. “They are more unhappy with life. I think, my God, could things have changed that much over there?”

Sometimes, it seems, communities such as Brighton tire of absorbing the new immigrants. Pauline Bulis, founder of Project Ari, which looks after Soviet emigres here, said some older emigres complain that they had no one to help them as the newcomers do.

“They don’t realize that it’s even more difficult now for the new immigrants with the job market as it is and the recession,” she said, “but, in the end, they say: ‘Thank God they’re here.’ ”