SOVIET UNION : Science a Casualty of Perestroika : Private companies lure brilliant innovators from their state jobs. Others are emigrating to gain much higher salaries abroad.

Oleg Maslov’s laboratory at the Institute of Thermal Physics resembles the set of a 1940s science fiction film, with glowing glass tubes, cluttered rows of black meters and the low, menacing throb of high voltage. But rather than experimenting with high-intensity lasers, as the lab was originally intended, Maslov spends his days making bathroom tiles and looking for new ways to freeze-dry fruit.

For the past year and a half, Maslov and seven colleagues have run a private company called Onyx out of the lab in the Soviet science complex, collecting their state salaries but not doing any work for the government.

“The director of this institute has his own private business too,” the 27-year-old Maslov said. “Nobody cares what we do.”

To the growing casualty list of the Soviet Union’s economy under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s program of perestroika (restructuring), add Soviet science. The brilliant innovators who stunned the world by orbiting the first man-made satellite are now preoccupied with how to buy their groceries.

“The future of Soviet science is under threat,” said Yuri Tsvetkov, the chief scientific secretary of the Siberian branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. “A young scientist can receive much higher pay in a private company. People are just quitting science.”

Akademgorodok, a suburb of the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, was founded in 1958 to provide a rustic, campus-like setting to nurture the country’s best scientific minds. Unlike Soviet industry, which always lagged behind the West, Soviet science achieved world-class status on a par with the United States and Western Europe.

Now Akademgorodok has become like the “Boston corridor,” with academics fleeing the ivory towers to enter private companies situated nearby.

“A lot of the labs are in a panic because everyone is quitting to go into business,” said Anatoly Zabalodny, a former physics graduate student who covers Akademgorodok for the Siberian Gazette. “It’s not only financial--a lot of labs have run out of money for scientific work.”

Another big problem for the science center is emigration, with foreign institutes offering this country’s brightest scientific minds salaries that seem like fortunes to underpaid Soviet scholars.

“The most experienced members of our staff have left,” said Veniamin Sedirov, deputy director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics. “If this process goes on, real Russian science will be completely destroyed.”

Sedirov said that his institute has lost 20 out of the 400 scientists working there to the United States, lured away by salaries of between $50,000 and $60,000 a year. (A junior scientist here earns 250 rubles a month, about $150 at the commercial rate of exchange, while a leading scientist with a doctorate earns 1,000 rubles--roughly $600.)

Valentin Vlasov, a biologist, said that experienced scientists now earn less than truck drivers and that the government has stopped its efforts to keep scientists supplied with larger-than-average quotas of meat and other commodities.

Vlasov said that government research money for his institute, which does work in genetics, had remained fixed over the last four years, while inflation in the same period has reached several hundred percent. And foreign currency has dried up, meaning that no chemicals or equipment can be purchased from abroad.

“A senior chemist just called me from Bethesda, Md., asking to have his leave of absence extended for another year,” Vlasov said. “It’s such a pity. We are losing our best people.”

Boris Shumilov is one academic who went into private business in a big way. Raised nearby, Shumilov became a theoretical physicist at the university and then worked in that field for nine years.

Now, Shumilov heads a conglomerate of companies that sell high technology to state and private businesses in this country.

Shumilov said he left his institute because money had run out for further research and he was no longer “working on the cutting edge of science.”

“Scientists don’t see any real future for themselves,” said the Academy of Sciences’ Tsvetkov. “Everybody is worried about how they can maintain a basic level of life.”