Moscow Mayor Urges Investment in Russia : Commerce: Despite difficulties and risk, Americans can do business there, he says.

Sounding like a seasoned capitalist, Moscow Mayor Gavriil Popov was in Orange County on Thursday to urge Americans to invest in Russia, where despite some risks, he said, “it’s possible . . . to do business.”

“Any businessman is afraid . . . when he goes into a new country,” said Gavriil, who met with reporters before speaking to about 400 people at a dinner sponsored by the Industrial League of Orange County. “But business is connected with risk, and only risks can give good profit.”

Only “five or six large American (business) projects” are underway in Russia, while “small Austria has about 30,” he said.

“I think our country needs most not aid, but contracts,” Gavriil said through an interpreter before his dinner speech at the Westin South Coast Plaza hotel.

The dinner was sponsored by the Industrial League, an advocacy group of more than 900 businesses employing more than 150,000 people. In recent months the organization has been host to former President Ronald Reagan, former presidential adviser Henry Kissinger and then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Popov, Moscow’s first democratically elected mayor, conceded to reporters that “the difficulties of doing business in Russia are real.”

“Banks, commodity exchanges, insurance companies, transport, communications, all this infrastructure has not yet been undertaken in my country,” he said. “That is why it is so difficult. . . .”

But Popov said foreign investors’ fears of Russian corruption and bribery are exaggerated.

Corruption occurs because most goods and services must be obtained through the government bureaucracy, he said.

“Get rid of the bureaucrat through privatization and competition,” he said.

“I think that American businessmen can start their business independently . . . without Russian partners,” Popov said. In the past, foreign-owned business in Russia required local partners, he said.

Popov defended Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s efforts to bring together the former Soviet republics, now independent. Former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s syndicated newspaper column, published Thursday by The Times, was critical of Yeltsin’s handling of the newly formed commonwealth of republics.

Popov did concede, however, that the commonwealth is not workable in its current configuration.

“But I disapprove of the decision of Gorbachev to be a commentator, especially in the foreign press,” Popov said. “Gorbachev had six years not to comment, but to act. If for six years he didn’t manage to act, if I were him, I would give other people an opportunity to act.”

Popov, who had urged Muscovites to protest in the street in opposition to the failed military coup, defended his own actions of February when he banned anti-Yeltsin demonstrators during Armed Services Day celebrations.

The February incident marked the first time since Yeltsin was elected in May, 1990, that violence was used to control mass demonstrations. Hard-line Communist demonstrators clashed with police brandishing nightsticks as the protesters tried to force their way to the Kremlin.

Popov said that four different groups had sought to demonstrate on the day that marked the 74th anniversary of the Red Army, and each was granted permission to demonstrate in a separate area of the city, he said.

“I allowed the demonstrations . . . in the specific places that were” designated, Popov said. “Three of the four (groups) agreed to it and the fourth, the Communists, decided they had exclusive rights to do what they want in the city.”