COLUMN ONE : The Rush to Give Advice : Communism’s collapse is a grand job opportunity for Western economic consultants. They pour into the Soviet Union seeking to help in the switch to capitalism.

Republican economist William A. Niskanen used to help set tax and budget policy in the Reagan Administration. Now he’s helping the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan set up a banking industry.

Democratic economist Lawrence H. Summers steered into a dead end when he signed on as economic adviser to unsuccessful Democratic candidate Michael S. Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign. But he struck pay dirt with one of his next clients: Lithuania. His work there helped propel him into a job as chief economist for the World Bank.

For Niskanen and Summers and hundreds of other American and Western European economists, the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union is more than a second Russian Revolution: It is one of the great career opportunities of all time.

Western economists and consultants of all stripes are pouring into the wreckage of the Soviet Union and its republics, trying to figure out the mind-boggling economic implications of suddenly switching from failed Marxist dogma to the roughneck economics of Western-style capitalism.

“This is easily the most exciting and complex challenge that has faced economists in the 20th Century,” exults Edgar Feige, a University of Wisconsin economist. He helped the government of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev forge a controversial and never-enacted economic reform proposal--the so-called “500-day plan”--last summer.

“We have no precedents for this,” Feige says. “We have never had a time when an enormous country, a superpower, has tried to reinvent itself overnight.”

It is an intellectual and professional exercise that American economists were generally unprepared to tackle before 1989 and 1990, when Eastern Europe first started calling in Western advisers after the Berlin Wall fell and freedom arrived.

But today, a flourishing cottage industry of professional advisers has sprung up in the West, eager to help steer each fledgling democracy that emerges in the East through the traumatic transition to the free market.

“You would need a supercomputer to keep track of them all,” muses a State Department expert on the Soviet economy.

And more are on the way. Plan-Econ, a Washington-based research and consulting firm that specializes in helping centrally planned economies, opened offices in Warsaw, Budapest, Hungary, and Prague, Czechoslovakia, last year and this year. It is planning new ones in Moscow and perhaps the Baltics.

Meanwhile, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund--the West’s leading international lending agencies--are expected to send their own technical advisers to proffer hints on broad economic policies and on how to deal with more specific challenges such as highway construction and food distribution. Last week, the World Bank agreed to provide $30 million to set up its first team of technical advisers for the Soviets.

“There are going to be literally hundreds of advisers from the World Bank and the IMF once they get going,” says Michael Bernstam, an economist and Soviet emigre at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who has been working with the government of Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin.

But some American economists argue that many of the most visible U.S. advisers have hyped their own importance and influence, at least partly to gain stature in the West. And they warn that such behavior could eventually spark resentment against Western advisers as the Soviet people wake up to the pain that will inevitably come with their move to capitalism.

“I’m sure that we come across as arrogant and overbearing and like know-it-alls,” acknowledges Judy Shelton, a Soviet expert at the Hoover Institution and a member of the team that has been advising Yeltsin’s new government.

Indeed, some government leaders in Eastern Europe openly dismiss many of the Western consultants whom they seemed to embrace only a year or two ago. Vaclav Klaus, Czechoslovakia’s finance minister, recently complained half-jokingly that one of his biggest difficulties is to wade through all the Western advisers who are camped out in Prague.

And not all the Western advice works flawlessly. Poland, where Western advice perhaps played a bigger role than in other Eastern European nations, now suffers from runaway inflation and staggering unemployment.

Although the changes have also brought some benefits to Poland--the start of some entrepreneurial efforts, for example--the country’s political leaders are reportedly beginning to disassociate themselves from many of the most ambitious ideas first pushed by outsiders.

Even some Westerners who played critical roles in Poland and other Eastern European nations, such as Jeffrey D. Sachs, the brash Harvard University economist, are now sometimes derided for spreading themselves too thin as they branch out looking for new countries to conquer.

Last week, for instance, Sachs was giving interviews to Western journalists about the state of the Soviet economy--by telephone from Budapest.

“I think it would be quite difficult to know the inner details of the economies of 10 or 12 countries, but that’s what Sachs is trying to do,” rasps Allan Meltzer, a Carnegie-Mellon University economist.

Sachs was out of the country and not available for comment.

So far, the Soviets seem to be listening. With little or no knowledge of Western economics but with a burning desire to leave Marxism in the dustbin of history, Soviet politicians, bureaucrats and academics have all begun feverishly groping for any scrap of information about the capitalist system.

University lectures by Western experts are greeted with overflow crowds. Advice from American specialists in specific industries such as banking and finance, agriculture and transportation suddenly becomes accepted wisdom.

A few leading Western advisers have already played a critical role in helping to educate Soviet leaders in free-market economics, which remains mysterious to many Soviet economists who were trained in Marxist dogma.

Often, economists whose names aren’t household words in the United States are virtually mobbed during their appearances in the Soviet Union. Wisconsin’s Feige recalls that he once gave a lecture in Moscow and immediately was asked to repeat it. “Five hundred people showed up for the second one,” he marvels.

It’s all heady stuff for economists and technical advisers who normally labor in comfortable obscurity on college campuses or Washington think tanks. “It’s very flattering, because it is hard for economists to get the attention of policy-makers in this country,” says Niskanen, now an economist at the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington research group.

But the Soviets’ naive confusion over the workings of free markets often stuns their American colleagues, leading some to wonder whether America’s former adversaries are yet capable of heeding Western advice. And sometimes, the Soviets still inadvertently reveal that their deep-seated belief in state planning as an economic cure-all hasn’t completely vanished.

Stan Johnson, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University, recalls that he was attending a conference in the Soviet Union recently when a group of Soviet economists suddenly pulled him away from the meeting to ask how to get their nation’s agriculture onto a free-market footing.

But it turned out that what they really wanted was for Johnson to tell them how big Soviet farms should be. “They didn’t understand that farm size was an outcome of market forces, not the other way around,” Johnson observes.

John Williamson, an economist at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, met with Soviet economists earlier this summer on how best to develop new currencies for the separate Soviet republics. But instead of questioning Williamson on the proper focus of monetary policy, the Soviet economists kept peppering Williamson “with all these questions about the best way physically to print money,” he says. “They thought that was the important question.”

It’s no wonder, then, that the Western economists think they are badly needed.

But perhaps inevitably, with so much at stake for Western advisers in the Soviet Union, professional jealousies have erupted as rival groups of economists vie for attention and influence, both in the East and the West.

The most prominent groups of American economic advisers now involved in the Soviet Union--the Hoover Institution group that is working with Yeltsin and a team from Harvard University that has been advising Gorbachev and the central government--have been waging an international war of words for months over the proper direction for Soviet economic reform.

The Harvard group, led by political scientist Graham Allison, has been pushing what has been dubbed “the Grand Bargain.” It is an ambitious if rather vague proposal, jointly developed with leading Soviet economists, that essentially would trade billions of dollars in Western financial assistance for a gradual, controlled approach to transforming the Soviet economy.

The Hoover panel--a more conservative group that eschews Harvard-style planning and instead favors a quick, “cold-turkey” move to free markets without as much central coordination--has suffered from a much lower profile in the Western media.

But the two sides have been clashing openly since the failure of the recent coup propelled the debate over Western aid into the headlines again. They both regularly contribute opposing opinion pieces in leading newspapers, and their members make nearly nightly television appearances on public affairs talk shows.

“I’m not too big on overarching and grandiose plans, like the Harvard approach, that all boil down to us writing a check,” sniffs Hoover’s Shelton. “That really leaves me cold. What they really need over there is to get rid of all pre-set plans. That’s what got them into trouble in the first place.”

Harvard’s Allison responds that such criticism is misplaced. Harvard doesn’t want to dump Western money in the laps of the Soviets, he insists. “What we are saying is that if you get your act together, we will help you,” he says.

Despite their conflicts, however, both groups seem destined to gain a measure of influence in post-coup Moscow.

Harvard’s Grand Bargain has received an important political boost from the emergence of one of its Soviet co-authors, Grigory Yavlinsky, a top Yeltsin aide who has become a key policy-maker in the post-coup committee that Yeltsin and Gorbachev set up jointly to steer economic reform. Many Western economists believe that he will continue to push key elements of the Grand Bargain.

The downside for the Harvard plan, however, is that the central Soviet government is rapidly unraveling, and Gorbachev’s authority may quickly vanish over the coming weeks.

The Hoover group has gained stature in the wake of the coup as well because it is advising Yeltsin, the hero of August’s democratic revolution and now the dominant political force in the nation. Hoover’s ideas also seem to have found a receptive audience among the most radical reformers in the Russian Federation’s Parliament. “We are just preaching to the choir there,” says Shelton.

In the end, however, most American advisers still recognize that the Soviets won’t buy their ideas wholesale.

“It would be arrogant and naive to think that Americans can go over there with a plan and expect it to be accepted without modifications,” says Edward Lazear, an economist at the University of Chicago who has been working with the Hoover group. “We are technical advisers, working like congressional staffers, nothing more.

“We are not calling the shots.”