Yanks Write New Chapter in Soviet Publishing : Books: Onetime propaganda mills still carry the works of Lenin. But American favorites, such as ‘The Godfather,’ are the top sellers.

If publishing has a barometer in the Soviet Union, it is Moscow’s Progress Publishers.

In the Brezhnev era, state-owned Progress had a well-deserved reputation as a major producer of political propaganda. Even now, the shelves of the Progress bookstore still groan under the weight of tomes such as the 55-volume collected works of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (in several languages), a biography of Ho Chi Minh and titles that include “Revolutionary Democracy and Communists in the East” and “The Party on the Road to Renewal.”

But in the Progress editorial offices next door, the atmosphere is very different. The staff there have their sights firmly set on America.

Progress’ Russian translation of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” for instance, has sold 6 million copies; its edition of George Bush’s autobiography, “Looking Forward,” sold out within two weeks, and a Russian-language edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica is in the works.

“We’re trying to change the image of Progress,” said Valery Moskalenko, who heads the publishing house’s literary agency. “Before, it was known as a propagandist. Now we want Progress to be a modern publishing house.”

The waning of official censorship has opened a floodgate of interest in every genre of American literature, from mysteries to political theory and history to biography and erotica. Everything sells.

“Once a customer sees that a book is from the U.S., it disappears from the shelves,” said Sergei Belov, an editor with the Raduga publishing house. “You don’t have to be a commercial writer to sell commercially here.”

Progress is banking on it. It plans to put out a host of works on American political thought, including “The Education of Henry Adams,” Alexander De Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” “The Federalist Papers” and Peter L. Berger’s “The Capitalist Revolution,” among others.

The U.S. government is even lending a hand: Through a U.S. Information Agency program, it is giving Progress a $10,000 grant to pay for copyright fees for the above titles. David Siefkin, an assistant cultural attache at the U.S. Embassy, said the USIA has given out $230,000 in grants to Soviet publishers the past two years to buy rights to books in American studies and political science.

“We’d also like to do fiction,” added Siefkin, “but it’s low priority for the USIA.”

That’s bad news for at least one publisher. The Raduga publishing house had to suspend plans to publish Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” because it does not have the hard currency to pay for the rights, which Siefkin said would cost $17,000.

Still, a great deal of American fiction can be legally published here without paying for foreign rights. The key is that it must have appeared in print before 1973, when the Berne Convention on international copyrights went into effect.

The Text cooperative, a private publishing house, specializes in American crime and mystery writing, sticking exclusively to pre-1973 works. Among the works Text has published are Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather,” a collection of mystery stories by Ed McBain, Raymond Chandler and Rex Stout, and titles by Dashiell Hammett, Ross MacDonald and others.

The print runs are substantial: 200,000 to 400,000, with the only limitation being scarcity of paper. Though the nominal cover price for Text’s books is four to eight rubles ($2.50 to $5 at the misleading official exchange rate), the black market price is several times that, suggesting that the market for American mystery writers is far from saturated.

The Novosti Press Agency turned to publishing American books out of necessity. When orders for its political brochures began to plummet and state publishing subsidies were slashed, Novosti had to cut 112 people from its work force and made plans to publish a number of marketable American titles.

Now, Novosti is negotiating for the rights to several books by Tom Clancy, Martin Cruz Smith’s “Gorky Park” and Alex Comfort’s “The Joy of Sex.” It has already signed contracts to put out John Irving’s “The World According to Garp” and the memoirs of former Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Novosti has already published “Speaking My Mind,” a collection of Reagan’s speeches and articles.

In the current climate of press freedom, it is clear that Soviet publishers no longer feel constrained by ideology or censorship. Financial concerns aside, few titles seem out of bounds. Even anti-communist U.S. academics Richard Pipes and Robert Conquest will have works published in the Soviet Union this year.

The U.S. Embassy’s Siefkin could think of only one recent case of censorship, involving a John Gardner novel. One of the characters, a sleazy politician, has a habit of hooking his thumbs under his armpits--a gesture associated with Lenin. The gesture was cut.