Critics Question Whether Strauss Is Still Right Choice for Soviet Envoy : Diplomacy: Events have outpaced the need for a deal-maker, they say. Now, knowledge and experience are at a premium.

The choice of former Democratic Chairman Robert S. Strauss as U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, hailed by some as a master stroke when U.S.-Soviet ties were broadening, came under attack Monday amid prospects that superpower relations are headed for a new freeze.

Now, the critics said, the post no longer requires a political and business deal-maker like Strauss to hasten the integration of the Soviet Union into U.S. and Western economies. Rather, they said, it calls for a diplomat with extensive knowledge who knows key Soviet players and can divine the dynamics of a country that may soon be far less open than it has been.

“It’s no longer the right match at all,” said Kim Holmes, foreign policy expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. “His skills are making deals, not in Soviet relations. He’s going to go in there with a cartoon-like understanding of who are the good guys and the bad guys. . . . It could mislead and confuse a lot of people.”

News of the Soviet coup prompted Strauss to cut short a vacation in Southern California and to head to Washington. Kathy Ellingsworth, his secretary in Washington, said Strauss would not be available for comment. But she added: “There have been no second thoughts.”

Strauss, 72, who is to be sworn in today, has freely admitted his limited knowledge of Soviet affairs.

The former trade representative and Middle East negotiator does not speak Russian, is short on arms-control background and has visited the country once. He and Thomas J. Watson, the former IBM chairman, are the only two ambassadors to Moscow in the last four decades who were not career diplomats.

“I’m no Russian expert,” Strauss said recently. But he insisted that he could quickly learn what is needed.

This argument was obviously persuasive to President Bush, who nominated the corporate lawyer June 4. At the time, Bush said Strauss’ knowledge of the United States and his ties to Republican and Democratic leaders would help assure rapid improvement of U.S.-Soviet relations. Both the President and Secretary of State James A. Baker III are longtime friends of Strauss.

Bush, who planned to attend today’s swearing-in, said Monday that Strauss “will hit the ground running when he gets over there.” At the daily State Department briefing, spokesman Richard Boucher denied that the Administration is reconsidering its support for the nominee.

Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department official who is now at the Brookings Institution, a think tank here, said that deteriorating relations between the Soviets and the West could abruptly end the frequent high-level Soviet-American contacts that were a prominent reason for choosing Strauss.

In this circumstance, Strauss “would be overqualified. . . . A competent career person could do the job,” Sonnenfeldt said.

The Strauss selection “happened in a different atmosphere, a time of a continued opening up and broadening of the relationship between the countries.” Now, if the hard-line Communist government remains in power “this won’t be the right job for Bob Strauss,” Sonnenfeldt said.

Sonnenfeldt said that Bush obviously could replace Strauss with someone more suited to the job, although he acknowledged that such a move “would be very unusual.”

He also cautioned that it is not yet clear how much the new Soviet leaders wish to shut off their nation and end economic reform. Although they clearly believe that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev should not have acceded to pressure to give more power to the Soviet republics, “they seem to recognize that things are seriously wrong with their economy and society,” he said.

Holmes, of the Heritage Foundation, said that the perfect candidate for the post would be Jack Matlock, the career Foreign Service officer who recently stepped down as ambassador to Moscow. Matlock “knows all the major players and the mid-level figures who are important . . . and knows how the Soviet Union works,” Holmes said.

“You have to know the Soviet Union well enough to know what questions to ask,” he said. “Today there were questions of whether tanks on the street were army tanks or KGB tanks. Would Strauss have even known to ask that question?”

While Strauss’ selection had been widely hailed, it drew fire from some quarters, including from conservative business leaders and Sovietologists.

But others came to Strauss’ defense Monday. They argued that his inexperience could be offset by adding Soviet experts to the American staff in Moscow.

Charles Black, a senior Republican strategist, insisted that, “if anything, it’s that much more important now that the ambassador should be a skilled political operative and somebody the President trusts. It’s important that the people on the Soviet end realize that the ambassador is speaking for the President.”