Baker Supports More Soviet Aid : Economy: Embracing a vastly expanded view of U.S. responsibility for assisting reform, he now speaks for the first time of significant Western financial help.

After five days inside the whirlwind of the Soviet Union’s democratic revolution, Secretary of State James A. Baker III has embraced a vastly expanded view of the U.S. responsibility for aiding Soviet economic reform and is quietly talking for the first time about significant Western financial aid to Moscow, aides said Saturday.

After long insisting that the United States can have little real influence over events in the Soviet Union, Baker and his aides have taken a close look at the newly transformed superpower and decided that they can--and must--help shape its destiny after all.

“The key thing . . . is that we have an enormous stake in these guys succeeding,” one senior Baker aide said after intensive meetings with Soviet reformers. “I think we have to do all we can to help make them successful.”

As a result, officials said, they are beginning work on proposals for an expanded multinational aid program that could eventually be comparable in scope and ambition--although not necessarily in cost--to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Western Europe after World War II.

The proposals are only in embryonic form now, the officials said, and will develop fully only after Soviet leaders produce an economic reform plan and an “economic treaty” among their 12 increasingly independent republics.

But they said its main elements would probably include:

* An expanded U.S. program of technical aid to Soviet institutions, possibly even including the placement of American advisers in Soviet government agencies.

* A U.S.-led program of “pilot projects” to produce quick and dramatic results in specific areas--food distribution in Leningrad, for example--to demonstrate that economic reforms can succeed.

* Ultimately, a major program of loans and credits, organized largely by the International Monetary Fund and other international financial institutions, to finance a large-scale transformation of the Soviet system.

“You can look at other IMF and World Bank programs and you can start to get some sense of what is required for very big economies. . . . Over time, you are clearly talking about substantial sums of money,” a senior official traveling with Baker said. “How much of it might be private capital flows, how much of it might be their own assets, how much might be the international community, I frankly think it’s impossible to tell right now.”

Baker and his aides still maintain that direct U.S. financial grants or loans to the Soviet Union won’t be necessary. But they are beginning to talk about multinational aid that would include substantial U.S. contributions--although some officials suggest that Japan might turn out to be an even larger donor than the United States.

Behind the new enthusiasm for helping the Soviet Union--only two months after the Bush Administration urged caution at the London meeting of the Group of Seven major industrial democracies--lies a new sense of both opportunity and danger.

“There is no way to come here right now . . . and not feel you’re in a new country,” a Baker aide said with a tone of genuine amazement. In the little more than three weeks since the collapse of a coup d’etat swept Communist conservatives out of power, the government of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has agreed to begin withdrawing military forces from Cuba, embraced the goal of fundamental economic reforms and even asked the CIA to lend help in reforming the KGB.

At every turn, the Soviets--from Gorbachev to radical economic adviser Grigory Yavlinsky to the new defense minister and KGB chief--have unashamedly asked for American advice and help.

“We really do have a kind of special authority,” another U.S. official said. “(But) the fact that we have a kind of special authority gives us a kind of responsibility as well.

“While everything we saw was sort of striking, and builds a tremendous sense of hope, it’s also true that these people are talking about their need to deliver--and there’s a danger if they don’t deliver,” he said. “Our policy is going to have to be shaped in a way that is designed to help them deliver.”

If the reformers cannot begin to “deliver” what the Soviet people need--food, housing and a decent standard of living--the result could be “the failure of the democratic experiment” and the return of some form of dictatorship, a third senior official warned.

Aides say Baker has been consulting privately with former Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who has frequently warned that a failure of reform efforts could have catastrophic effects.

“It is not only an internal matter for the Soviet Union,” Shevardnadze told reporters accompanying Baker last week. “Essentially, the fate of the world depends, to a large degree, on the stability of the situation here.

“To extricate the country from its current crisis, we need astronomical amounts of money,” Shevardnadze added. “We have to buy a lot of grain . . . and this is the assistance we expect.”

U.S. officials agree that the Soviet Union may need large-scale humanitarian aid this winter. But over the long run, they insist, massive financial aid is not the real answer.

Instead, they said, the new Western effort should focus on a combination of large-scale “technical assistance”--meaning advice and managerial help--plus the availability of large credits from the IMF and the World Bank linked to specific reforms.

“The next step is probably full membership in the IMF,” one senior official said. Two months ago, he acknowledged, the Administration blocked IMF membership for the Soviets when Western European countries proposed it. “Things have changed,” he said. “Their debate over reform is over. They’re ready to move, and they’ll probably have a workable (reform) plan together by the end of the year.”

Senior officials said Baker and his aides were deeply impressed by the efforts Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders made to demonstrate their new commitment to move to a genuinely free-market economy.

When Gorbachev met with Baker in the Kremlin last week, the official noted, he had a single economist at his side: radical reformer Yavlinsky--a clear signal that he had cast his lot with a free-market system. “Two months ago, Yavlinsky wouldn’t have had a seat at that table,” the official said.

As a result, the officials said, they are convinced that the Soviets intend to move quickly to devise and implement a reform plan that includes key elements the United States has long been urging: privatization of industries and farmland, laws to establish the right to own private property, the abolition of state-owned monopolies and other measures to encourage competition, and an end to the system under which the Soviet government now controls the prices of almost everything that is bought or sold.

Boris N. Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Federation, also played a key role in influencing the Americans by telling them that he wants Gorbachev’s central government to retain a significant coordinating role in economic affairs.