COMMENTARY ON GEOPOLITICS : Adversaries of the Cold War ‘80s Are Knotting Ties That Bind : Russia and Orange County may be strange bedfellows, but all neighborhoods are becoming more global.

Russia and Orange County: Do they fit together easily in your mind? They don’t in mine.

A county reputed for its bedrock conservatism and military contractors--and a jewel in the crown of American capitalism--seems an unlikely place to have significant ties with Russia. Stranger bedfellows would be hard to imagine.

Yet last Thursday, the outspoken mayor of Moscow, Gavriil Popov, joined the steady stream of prominent Russians who have flowed in and out of the county in recent years. He addressed the powerful Industrial League of Orange County on the opportunities awaiting U.S. investors in his tumultuous homeland.

From the Cold War ‘80s to today, there have been strong connections between Russia and Orange County.

For example, in May, 1988, when the Berlin wall was still a flash point, 20 top Soviet advisers to then-General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev participated in a three-day dialogue in Newport Beach with 25 American citizens on the future of U.S.-Soviet relations. The talks, given national TV coverage, were part of the Dartmouth Conference on Soviet-American Relations.

As a participant, I met Dr. Sergei Plekhanov, deputy director of Moscow’s Institute of U.S.A. and Canada Studies--who was to become a key link between Russia and Orange County in the coming years.

Plekhanov is now a visiting professor of history at UC Irvine, where he is teaching a standing-room-only course on the Gorbachev revolution. Recently, I sat in on his class as he gave a spellbinding eyewitness account of August’s failed coup and what it was like to be with those few thousand courageous souls behind the barricades near the Russian White House.

In addition to the many dinners he and his wife, Natasha, have recently attended throughout the county, Dr. Plekhanov has been speaking at nearby colleges and universities.

UC Irvine will doubtless continue being a major factor connecting Russia to Orange County. Besides bringing Dr. Plekhanov here, in the past two months the university has brought 66 Russians connected with the military-industrial complex to Irvine and plans to bring 60 more such Russians to the campus this spring.

Social ecology professor John Whiteley has been instrumental in organizing these visits. He and Prof. Paula Garb, a Russian-speaking UC Irvine anthropologist, are involved in five environmental projects with Russian scientists, policy-makers and non-governmental organizations.

Another key person in the Orange County connection with Russia is Thomas T. Tierney, owner of Body Wise International, a firm specializing in food supplements.

Tierney, upon recently being phoned by the Russian Winter Campaign headquarters in San Francisco and asked to donate food supplements to undernourished Russians and their neighbors, was eager to help. But he was unsure whether he could ship the goods within five days, as asked. He phoned back a little later and said his company could meet the deadline.

The upshot was that Body Wise International recently donated two metric tons of food supplements, including multi-vitamins and mineral tablets, virtually on a moment’s notice.

“It’s a global thing,” Tierney told me. “We live on a shared planet. A need in Russia is like a need in the neighborhood.”

Perhaps other companies in the county, some six of which are doing business in Russia, will show a similar sense of global community and social responsibility. Equally important, county citizens, including college students and retirees, have been donating to the Russian Winter Campaign.

At a foreign policy conference earlier this month in Washington sponsored by the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, former President Nixon urged our government to provide $20 billion a year to help Russia democratize and build a market-based economy.

Russia’s transformation is “the major foreign policy issue of our time,” Nixon said, and future world peace and prosperity depend on it. Given now, such aid would be minuscule compared to what our country would pay if democracy fails in Russia and that country rearms.

None of Orange County’s congressmen favor Nixon’s proposal. However, Democratic presidential candidate Larry Agran of Irvine told me that while $20 billion seemed high, he is in basic agreement with Nixon. But such aid should be conditioned on the former Soviet republics’ dismantling and surrendering to an international agency all but a small fraction of their nuclear weapons, the United States doing likewise.

Nixon and Agran are right. But even if Washington gives little further aid, I can’t help thinking that Orange County, ironically perhaps, will continue to be an important link to the ongoing drama being played out in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. In response to such momentous events, our Orange County neighborhood is becoming more global by the day.