COLUMN ONE : Turkey: The West’s Bridge East : Former Soviet republics seek nurturing. Western powers seek to ensure stability. Their paths are meeting in Turkey.

It is an adventuresome, historic spring for Turkey. The prime minister, the national airline, diplomats, businessmen, Big Bird and the Cookie Monster have all been dispatched on voyages of exploration to uncharted lands of Central Asia.

Turkey is shaking off decades of Cold War aloofness, emerging as a new regional power at a volatile and busy international crossroads.

It is testing new muscles in direct competition with Iran and China for friends and customers across a broad swath of awakening Central Asia.

There are questions about the dollars-and-cents benefits for Turkey. But for a still-poor nation sprung from the ruins of an empire, the new role swells national pride.

From the sidelines, the United States and Western Europe applaud the growing Turkish shadow, which also newly extends into the Balkans and the Middle East.

Medetkan Sherimkulov, agape at the glitter of a swirling hotel lobby here, is a man of these new Turkic times. He looks Chinese but turns out to be the affable chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Kyrgyzstan, a poor, remote and newly independent shard of the former Soviet Union.

Kyrgyzstan has 4.4 million people, a 640-mile border with China, an official language and alphabet imposed for 70 years from Moscow, development needs uncounted--and a long-lost friend in the West with whom to share new dreams.

“The Turks are our brothers,” Sherimkulov said. “We share the same blood, the same religion and the same language. This is the motherland. It can help us in all things.”

Sherimkulov had come to the Turkish capital at the head of an official delegation looking for all-in-the-family economic help and to enroll bright Kyrgyz students on scholarships at Turkish universities. In independence, Kyrgyzstan and its neighbors want an alternative to dominance by Russia.

A pleased if somewhat bemused beneficiary of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Turkey is embarked on a full-court press to extend its influence east and west to Turkic lands and communities so long cut off from Western influences.

For decades the eastern flank of NATO, Turkey suddenly offers the West the prospect of a relatively sturdy bridge eastward to little-known, volatile, unstable new nations hungry for change. But its spreading of the gospel of Western political and economic values to the East also improves Turkey’s standing in the West; there this valued American ally is seeking membership in the European Community.

In five Islamic former Soviet republics extending in a long and lonely arc from the Caspian Sea to the Chinese border, there are Turkic majorities: Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. There is also a 30% Turkic minority in Tajikistan, where the majority speaks a Persian-related language and the Turkish-Iranian struggle for influence is particularly marked.

Turkey, a republic sprung from the remains of the Ottoman Empire, spent decades studiously ignoring neighborhood spats. But it emerged as a major allied player in last year’s Gulf War. Since the collapse of communism, it has bulked large in Bulgaria, where there is a strong Turkish minority, and farther west, where brother Muslims look for Turkish support from Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

More than 1,000 Turkish businessmen have set up shop in Romania. Turkish construction teams are building roads, airports and hospitals from the Persian Gulf north into Russia. Some 3 million Turkish workers live in Western Europe, half of them in Germany.

Nationalists claim proudly that, counting the Central Asians, there are about 140 million Turks, including 15 million in Iran and 13 million in China. Almost 60 million of them are in the republics of Central Asia; double-locked in remote hinterlands and in sterile Soviet communism for seven decades, they are belatedly entering this century. They are in a hurry to get with the program--computers to stereos, jeans to jets.

Who better to lead the way than long-lost cousins who settled in what is now Turkey after migrations that began a millennium ago in those same Asian steppes that are now so anxious for development?

Seen from Central Asian eyes so long forbidden to peer beyond Moscow, brawny Turkey is everything they are not--but might like to be.

It is the world’s only democratic, secular Muslim state, a dynamic workshop for rapid modernization in the context of a booming free-market economy.

“The star of history is shining for the Turkish people. We do not have pan-Turkic aspirations. But this region is the land of our forefathers. What is wrong in saying that?” observed Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel during a blue-ribbon tour of the former Soviet, Central Asian republics with government officials and Turkish businessmen.

As his tour ended recently, Demirel had promised $1 billion in food aid and export guarantees. At least 10,000 high school and college students from the republics will go to school in Turkey at government expense. Turkish schools, businesses, state corporations and the Foreign Ministry will train teachers, bankers, accountants and diplomats.

It will soon be easier, and cheaper, to get in and out of Central Asia from Istanbul than Moscow--if it isn’t already. State-owned Turkish Airlines (THY) is busily establishing scheduled service to a suddenly alluring East that has been a blank spot on Turkish maps for centuries. Twice-weekly flights are scheduled to begin this month to Tashkent and Alma-Ata, the capitals of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan; THY service will double to four flights a week to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.

A regional framework of governmental cooperation is also emerging. Demirel recently urged other Islamic countries to admit the new Turkic republics as members of an economic cooperative group. Last week, Demirel, Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani and Pakistani leaders attended a summit of Central Asian states in the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat (formerly Ashkabad) to discuss regional issues and approve construction of a new rail line along the route of the ancient Silk Road.

In June, Demirel will host the foundation of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Region, which will include many of Turkey’s disparate neighbors, including Greece, Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. In the fall, Demirel will preside at the first Turkic summit.

“My head is spinning . . . I am full of excitement,” Demirel said as he returned from republics that seemed genuinely glad to see him. “This Turkish world has opened unimaginable opportunities. . . . The Soviet Union has been dissolved in one sense, but not in another. The empire has fallen. Nothing has replaced it. But what we saw there is a Turkish world, at least in people’s intentions.”

Perhaps the most powerful, certainly the most audacious, of Turkey’s calling cards to the East is television. The new Ayrasya channel, beamed by satellite, is accessible to 98% of viewers in Central Asia with existing antennas. Transmissions that began this month will provide more than 50 hours a week of broadcasts to each of the Central Asian republics, according to Sedat Orsel, deputy general director of Turkish National Television.

Programming--from “Sesame Street” to news to Brazilian soap operas to sports and feature films--will all be in Turkish, a common tongue spoken with many variations in the republics.

In another two years, Orsel says, Turkish-owned satellites will not only transmit television signals but also provide direct links to the West for telecommunications, most of which is now routed through Moscow.

The U.S. government may sub-lease time on the current Turkish-controlled satellite circuits for its own television programming to Central Asia, according to the U.S. embassy here.

Some of the programs on the new Turkish network, which can also be seen throughout Western Europe, carry subtitles in the Latin-based alphabet that Turkey uses. That, simple as ABC, is part of the competition with Iran.

In Soviet times, the Turkic republics learned the Cyrillic alphabet to go with their imported Russian. Now, each of them must decide to remain with Russia’s Cyrillic, or, more likely, agree on a new written alphabet: Roman or Arabic. With a flood of second-hand Turkish typewriters and new textbooks reinforcing the Ayrasya broadcasts, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan have already decided to spell like the Turks. The rest are expected to follow suit, with the possible exception of Tajikistan.

“Seventy years is a long time. They don’t know anything about the West. Television is an open window to our society and values. In two years, all Turks will understand one another,” said Orsel, architect of the $10-million project to launch the satellite transmission.

In the 19th Century, agents of European powers and Russia vied for influence in Central Asia in what was known as The Great Game. Today, the key players are regional: the Iranians, who, like conservative Saudis, have mostly money and religious orthodoxy to offer the new Islamic republics; Islamic Pakistan; and the two Asian giants--China, and, of course, Russia.

Among the contestants, Turkey’s blood ties, and its unique political and economic track record in the past decade, give it a leg up, at least in the Turkish view.

“These people have come out of totalitarianism, and after being cut off for decades, they want to open to the modern world. Unless they are disappointed in what they find, I don’t think they would buy Iranian-type fundamentalism,” said Seyfi Tashan, director of the Foreign Policy Institute at Hacettepe University here.

Indeed, the Central Asian republics, like Islamic lands in the Balkans, all say their goal is integration with the international community as secular and democratic states--just like mother-brother Turkey.

“We will become a regional power, but a soft power,” Tashan said. “It is not any question of becoming a fireman, but of helping to solve regional problems, and teaching our model to the rest of our neighborhood.”

In the sudden enthusiasm, there are some cautious voices. Turkish big business is not as enamored of economic prospects in the East as some of the thousands of smaller firms seeking a piece of perhaps distant profits.

“Integration of the Turkic world is more psychological than real. The Turkic republics are not strong economically. They have nothing to sell us; their industry is backward and integrated with Russia,” said Ertugrul Ozkok, editor of the mass circulation newspaper Hurriyet. “Maybe Turkey is the model not so much because it is Turkey, but because it is the way west.”

For all of its public optimism, the Turkish government must also have private reservations about stability of the region. Demirel had to cancel a stop in Tajikistan because of unrest there. And not even the most ebullient of Central Asian politicians can be sure that either democracy or free market economics will take root.

In the view of the Western powers, that is all the more reason Turkey is to be encouraged in playing East. “Instability in that region requires a new and novel approach. Turkey is close to the Central Asian states of the former Soviet Union, and if Turkey is not the critical country in the region, then it’s going to be Iran,” French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas observed.

Dumas spoke during a meeting of European Community foreign ministers in Portugal earlier this month. The session’s theme was closer ties with Turkey. France and Britain particularly support the emergence of Turkey as a regional power.

France’s President Francois Mitterrand was a recent visitor to Ankara, followed soon thereafter by British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, who said Britain will use its upcoming term as EC president to propose a special relationship with Turkey “comparable to that between the EC and the United States or Japan.”

That is music to Turkish ears.

A country of 57 million whose per capita income is still less than $3,000 and whose international image still suffers a tarnished human rights reputation as an aftermath of its military rule in the early 1980s, Turkey desperately wants to be accepted as a full-fledged partner in Europe.

The Turkish government, and its supporters in Europe, are betting that a giant step east may also ultimately prove the decisive step west for a key country-in-the-middle.

Turkey: a Country in the Middle

* Population: 57 million

* Area: 300,948 square miles (twice the size of California)

* Religions: Muslim, Christian and Jewish

* Economic activity: Agriculture (cotton, tobacco, wheat, fruit, nuts, barley, oil seeds, maize, sugar beets, potatoes, tea, olives, cattle, sheep, goats, poultry), mining (chromium, copper, borax, coal, petroleum, natural gas, bauxite, iron ore, manganese, sulfur), manufacturing (textiles, food processing, iron and steel, petroleum refining, industrial chemicals), construction and tourism.