Russia’s Neo-Capitalists Learning Art of Rip-Off : Takeovers: Former Communist officials are taking advantage of privatization to try to grab state property.

They belong to an emerging breed of Russian capitalist, the robber barons with a difference.

With the business acumen of a Slavic super-swindler, these budding takeover artists crafted a mega-deal, worth a billion rubles or more, that would have won them control of a big chunk of the former Soviet military-industrial complex, including a Moscow air base.

The resulting conglomerate, called Kolo, would reportedly have been able to make everything from samovars for brewing tea to satellites and rockets capable of orbiting the Earth.

An admirable example of the entrepreneurial spirit taking root in Russian soil? Not exactly: The Kolo deal was an attempt at a colossal rip-off of state assets, and those behind it were high-ranking officials of the now banned Communist Party Central Committee.

“They were in fact trying to siphon state property away from state control,” Anatoly B. Chubais, chairman of the Committee on State Property, the agency in charge of privatization, said of the attempted “grab” that was discovered and foiled at the last moment just days ago.

Disturbingly, the party functionaries-turned-capitalists had well-connected allies on the inside of President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government, apparently including Chubais’ own deputy, Alexander Yutkin, who lost his job Thursday, and perhaps Russia’s minister of industry as well.

More important, what may well become the first financial scandal of free-market Russia is only the most flagrant example of the greatest threat facing this country as it embarks on what can justifiably be termed the “sale of the century”--the privatization of a superpower’s huge government-owned holdings, from factories to taxi fleets.

For in an unsettling number of cases, yesterday’s Communist bureaucrats are simply converting themselves into the CEOs and owners of the Russia of tomorrow, officials say. In the words of Mikhail Berger, the economics observer of the newspaper Izvestia, such people have come up with the “neat idea to merge their rank and state property.”

What has been dubbed “ nomenklatura privatization” (the nomenklatura was the official upper crust of the Communist state) is part and parcel of the Gilded Age morals now reigning in Russia. Amid rampant corruption and pygmy-like regulatory agencies, everything seems to be on sale.

In a decree made public Saturday, for example, Yeltsin authorized Commonwealth of Independent States air force units in Russia to sell up to 1,600 of their now-excess planes abroad, tax-free, to finance better barracks, increased salaries and other needs.

The strings attached seemed minimal--Russia’s defense potential cannot be harmed, and sales must be cleared by the Ministry of Foreign Trade. The temptation appears overwhelming for cash-strapped generals to accept “sweeteners” from foreign clients seeking a good deal.

Last Friday, Chief State Inspector Valery A. Makharadze, a growling, heavyset look-alike for Marlon Brando’s “Godfather,” promised a full-scale “offensive” against officials who try to become the owners of the agencies or enterprises they serve by surreptitiously engineering their privatization. But he has just 90 subordinates for all of Russia.

Other schemes have been unmasked, including one by government officials in the Tula region south of Moscow. Anatoly Ustyuzhanin, the former first deputy minister of agriculture, and a man named Nikitin, who headed an agency exporting farm products, have also been fired for engaging in “ nomenklatura privatization.”

For its breathtaking breadth and boldness, the Kolo deal rivals a Wall Street scandal. Pending an investigation by the state prosecutor general, most details are being kept secret, but some information has been made public by Chubais, Makharadze and Berger, or has leaked into the press.

The joint-stock company, formed with state assets and to be owned by individuals and enterprises, featured such luminaries of the Soviet era as Leonid P. Kravchenko, the urbane former chairman of state television and radio, and the Central Committee official in charge of the military-industrial complex, Oleg S. Belyakov.

Largely for their “intellectual property” (read: ideas), each of those two was to be issued shares in the company worth 10 million rubles, or about $100,000 at the Central Bank rate. There were at least 14 shareholders, many of them women believed to be wives of former party apparatchiks.

The giant Energiya aerospace complex, where Soviet booster rockets and satellites are constructed, contributed 200 million rubles ($2 million) in real estate and other property to the venture, including Vnukovo-3, a military airfield in southwest Moscow.

Other defense-related industries chipped in real estate and valuables whose value was camouflaged in the documents drawn up to create the company. Total assets for Kolo were valued at around 1 billion rubles, or $10 million.

According to the radical Moscow newspaper Kuranty, the department of the Foreign Trade Ministry that exports weapons joined as a charter member. Russia’s minister of industry, Alexander A. Titkin, allegedly signed a special directive authorizing the Kolo deal.

“So many former apparatchiki got together in Kolo Ltd. that it is hard to believe that they were acting without (Deputy Prime Minister) Yegor T. Gaidar’s or some other vice premier’s knowledge,” Kuranty charged.

The committee that Chubais heads has final authority to sign off on privatization deals, and its inspectors uncovered the Kolo scheme at the last moment. An in-house probe of Titkin has been launched, and a government meeting chaired Thursday by Yeltsin ordered strict measures taken to end “ nomenklatura privatization.”

But in many places, the foxes may already have cleaned out the chicken coop. Chubais admitted last week that he does not have comprehensive information on how much property has been illegally bought up by former Communist officials and acknowledged that it was only on Jan. 29 that the decrees fixing the framework for selling of state assets were issued.