COLUMN ONE : Soviets Learn Art of the Deal : About 1,200 firms spring up offering thousands of items at the nation’s biggest commodities exchange. Being a broker is a hot new profession.

Hundreds of fledgling Soviet brokers crowd around two trading pits as an announcer in a big bow tie reads off what’s for sale today at the Russian Commodities and Raw Materials Exchange: 100,000 jars of mayonnaise, 65 tons of sheet steel, a shiny new Porsche sports car and much, much more.

When a broker hears what he wants, he raises a blue, yellow or red card with the number of his brokerage company. He scans the room for the card of the firm that has the item for sale.

After quick negotiation, the brokers scurry to the trading hall’s bank of telephones. Clients must be advised, deals must be confirmed.

With 1,200 active brokerages, offering thousands of items for sale each day--from bulk paper to cement to Xerox copiers--and with a monthly trading volume as high as 1 billion rubles, or $555 million at the official commercial rate, this is the Soviet Union’s biggest commodities exchange.

In a country famous for shortages, brokers here at the Russian Commodities and Raw Materials Exchange say they no longer listen when people complain.

“It’s a myth that there are no goods in the Soviet Union,” Mikhail S. Lapshin, head of the brokers’ union at the exchange, said during a recent trading session. “An unbelievably large quantity of goods comes to us. We sell everything here from nails to airplanes.”

Since the Russian Commodities and Raw Materials Exchange opened nine months ago, the volume of trading has skyrocketed. One day last month, the trading volume of 190 million rubles, or $105 million, exceeded the total for all of February, 124 million rubles or $69 million. The monthly volume record of 1 billion rubles was set in May, thanks to several huge deals.

With so much business being done, the price for a seat on the exchange has soared. In October, firms could buy seats on the exchange for 100,000 rubles ($55,500), but in a recent auction, six brokerage firms bought seats for 4.5 million rubles ($2.5 million) each. There are even 20 foreign firms with seats on the exchange.

The brokerage business has become a hot new profession for the young and ambitious. These hot summer days, many brighten the trading floor with wild Hawaiian print shirts or micro-miniskirts instead of the badly tailored polyester suits and ties worn by the state financiers in Moscow.

“I love the fast pace of the work,” said broker Leonid Osipov, 21. “Your success depends only on you, on your own abilities, not on some boss. There are excellent prospects for the future.”

A starting broker’s monthly earnings range from 1,000 to 2,000 rubles ($555 to $1,110), or three to six times the average Soviet monthly wage. But because the brokers work on commission, the experienced among them can earn tens of thousands of rubles monthly--money only black marketeers could imagine a couple of years ago.

“At the exchange, you can earn a lot of money quickly and honestly,” said Igor R. Kaminsky, 29, owner of the Vikor brokerage firm. “Before, the only ways to earn a lot of money quickly were dishonest.”

The exchange’s explosive growth results from the disintegration of the Soviet Union’s centralized economy. Unable to get what they need through old channels, directors of state-owned factories as well as chiefs of new, privately owned enterprises increasingly are turning to brokers to sell their products and get them supplies and raw materials.

“Our economy was formed as an economy of state monopolies, and manufacturing resources were all monopolized by the state apparatus--lumber, metal, chemicals, machines, mechanical equipment, et cetera,” said Vladimir A. Tikhonov, a national legislator and head of the Union of Cooperatives. “Everything was distributed through the government supply agency, and therefore entrepreneurs had nowhere to buy production resources for themselves.”

Commodities exchanges have stripped the state distribution network and state-owned factories of their monopoly hold on the Soviet marketplace.

“The commodities exchanges are one of the most active forms of free enterprise in the Soviet Union today,” Tikhonov said. “Every day, a greater percent of the resources of production are offered for free trade through the exchanges.”

The demand for new marketplaces was so great, Lapshin said, that in the last year more than 400 commodities exchanges have cropped up--from Baku, in the southern republic of Azerbaijan, to the oil-rich Tyumen region of Siberia--giving a boost to private industry.

“The thing is that, in the Soviet Union, there are two prices for each good,” Lapshin said. “One is the state price, which is very low. But there’s another price, the market price, and it’s determined here. Those who have goods don’t want to sell them at the low state prices; they would rather sell them here.”

Because old supply channels have broken down, the commodities exchanges have been forced to double as auction houses for goods that would not be sold in commodities markets in other countries.

“In your country, a lot of this stuff would be sold in stores,” said Lapshin as he pointed out American-made telephones, Soviet-made sewing machines and other products on display. “But here, there’s nothing in the stores, so we sell it all here.”

U.S. commodities exchanges deal in a far more limited range of goods, primarily metals and agricultural and energy products. And U.S. trading differs sharply in other ways, leaving the Soviet system looking primitive by comparison.

Soviet exchanges function as huge wholesale marketplaces, where most goods are sold at spot prices and delivery is expected. But U.S. exchanges deal in futures, with brokers buying or selling contracts to trade a commodity at a certain price on a specified date. Rarely is actual delivery of a product the purpose of U.S. trading. The point is to speculate on price fluctuations or to hedge against them. Soviet exchanges have yet to introduce such sophisticated trading.

The Russian Commodities and Raw Materials Exchange, although the country’s busiest and most technologically advanced, is a far cry from American commodities exchanges in other ways.

In the large hall of the Moscow Central Post Office that the exchange rents for its trading floor, an electronic sign communicates continuous messages to the brokers. But instead of up-to-date information on deals, it carries day-old data or advertisements.

From a balcony above the trading floor, a bust of Vladimir I. Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, looks disapprovingly down on the emergent capitalists.

As the Soviet Union tries to revolutionize its economy, commodities exchanges have proven popular with public and private companies alike. The new private enterprises like them because there is almost no other wholesale marketplace for buying equipment and materials and selling finished products. For state-owned factories, they are a way to sell goods at high prices instead of state-set prices that are often lower than production costs.

Igor A. Yeramov, general director of a year-old business that manufactures building materials out of stone, said his company has spent about half a million rubles, or $275,000, at the Russian Commodities and Raw Materials Exchange to buy equipment to make tiles.

“Without the exchange it would be very difficult to do business these days,” Yeramov said. “Many materials are simply impossible to get anywhere else.

“Some of the equipment that we bought at the exchange could have been bought through state enterprises, but we would have had to wait 1 1/2 years for it,” he added. “In the time we would have waited, the equipment will more than pay for itself--even at the high price we paid at the exchange.”

Many state-run businesses still hesitate to buy equipment and materials through the exchanges because the prices are two to 10 times higher than state prices. But some directors of state-owned factories, like Anatoly I. Ioffe, say the exchanges are the only place to find “everything you need.”

“The prices are high for those who have nothing to sell,” said Ioffe, director of Sovremstroi Materialy factory. “But not for us. For instance, we sold reinforced concrete, which is used for foundations, and were able to buy the plywood we needed but couldn’t get anyplace else.”

The effectiveness of the exchanges, Ioffe said, proves that the biggest problem in the Soviet economy today is a failing distribution system and not an absence of goods.

“The old centralized supply and distribution systems are broken down,” Ioffe said. “But the commodities exchanges are taking their place.”

Prices of goods have stabilized since the exchange’s early days and many have even fallen over the last few months, said Natalya A. Belkina, a statistician. “Market forces really work.”

Commodities markets are not new to Russia. Introduced in 1702 by the reformist Czar Peter the Great, they were a key institution in the economy before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. But the forerunner of the Russian Commodities and Raw Materials Exchange was closed shortly after the revolution, and dictator Josef Stalin put an end to the remaining exchanges in 1929. Brokers were dispatched en masse to prison or to the firing squads.

The Russian Commodities and Raw Materials Exchange still has a lot of kinks to work out. Its telephones are only local lines, so brokers cannot call clients in other cities. And because brokers share phones, clients cannot call them at the exchange.

Although the exchange’s goods for sale far exceed material and equipment easily available elsewhere, some things--for instance, specialized equipment that is made only abroad--cannot yet be bought on the exchange.

“There is some equipment we need to cut and finish stone that we would like to buy at the exchange, but it’s not for sale,” Ioffe said. “It can only be purchased for convertible currency, and we only have rubles.”

Business ethics are another common complaint. Broker Yuri V. Lebedev recently went to the exchange with the intention of buying thousands of gallons of vegetable oil. Several brokerage firms were offering oil, but Lebedev could not make a deal because they all wanted money transferred to their bank accounts first, before delivery.

“I will only buy it if they deliver the oil first,” insisted Lebedev, 28, a former electrician. “I’ve learned my lesson. Two times I’ve trusted someone and they’ve deceived me.”

In one instance, Lebedev arranged to buy a large quantity of oil and his client transferred money to the account of the firm that promised to supply it. Months later, the oil has not shown up.

“My client lost tens of millions of rubles,” Lebedev said.

Despite such problems, Lebedev said there is no alternative to the exchange.

“The exchange is the only place where I can buy what I need,” he said.