Shock Troops of Peace Corps Mean Business in Russia : Volunteers: On first-ever mission, 100 U.S. professionals arrive to teach free-market basics.

Roger Dennis was most apprehensive about the cold showers that might confront him during his two-year stay in Russian buildings with iffy pipes. But not to worry, the San Jose resident said Saturday. He had seen some wonderful little water heaters in Ireland and Scotland.

“I’ve got a great idea for a business!” Dennis said. “Why can’t they make those here?”

Dennis and 99 other equally enthusiastic U.S. business professionals landed in Moscow on Saturday as the shock troops of the first Peace Corps program ever to operate in Russia.

Long condemned by the old Soviet government as a front for U.S. spies, the Peace Corps is setting up programs this year in several republics of the former Soviet Union, from the Baltic states to Central Asia. It plans to have 500 volunteers in place by the end of next year.

In Russia, the first 100 volunteers will go through three months of training, including language study, and then work to help develop small businesses on the Pacific coast and in cities along the Volga River.

“We see your arrival in Russia as an event of real political importance,” Alexander Zhitnikov, a Russian official who oversees foreign aid programs here, told the 100 jet-lagged Americans at a news conference to welcome them.

At an average age of 41, the volunteers are older and more experienced than typical Peace Corps members who have been setting off to teach English or subsistence farming in the Third World since the corps was founded under President John F. Kennedy in 1961.

And with good reason, acting Peace Corps Director Barbara Zartman said. When the corps put out the call earlier this year for people to work in the former Soviet Union, it asked for those with several years of business experience who would fit in with the Peace Corps’ mission to develop skills for Russia’s fledgling market economy.

So the group includes people like Dennis, 48, veteran of years in management in steel, oil and high-tech companies; his wife, Ruth Rouse, 51, a Stanford economics graduate and former Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica, and Los Angeles resident Carey Leffler, 63, on leave from his job as general manager of the University Cooperative Housing Assn., which handles low-rent housing for UCLA students.

These people “are sacrificing to be here,” Zartman said. “Many have sold their cars, sold their houses, closed down their businesses in order to share two years of their lives with the Russian people at a time when they themselves are sacrificing for a better tomorrow.”

Most of the volunteers will live with Russian families and receive stipends of only $200 a month. They are forbidden to work for profit while on the program.

Alida Buchanan, 48, a banker and lawyer from Oakland, said she did not mind the hardships for this chance “to see Russia at such an historic time, to learn the language and culture, and to have an adventure.”

“There aren’t too many times in life when you can walk away from things,” she said. “I left my job with Bank of America, my cat, my dog, my car, my home, my daughter, my friends--a comfortable life. But I can have a comfortable life like that later.”

The volunteers knew very little about what they would actually be doing; some were worried about just how grim their conditions would be and how well they would be able to learn Russian in three months.

“I’ve walked on the beach with my tape recorder and listened and listened” without making much progress with Russian language tapes, said Earl Trotter of Bonsall, Calif., a real estate broker who closed down his agency to come to Russia.

“There may be some hardships,” said Leffler of Los Angeles. “Some severe hardships.”

But the 100 volunteers looked undaunted, and Russian officials said their enthusiasm would be matched by the Russian people who hosted them.

Russian Foreign Ministry official Boris Golovin assured the volunteers that no one really believed they were CIA agents anymore and that Russian pride would not be insulted by their efforts to help.

Volunteer help does not mean that a nation is primitive, he said, and one day, perhaps, “there may be a time when Russian volunteers go to the United States of America to offer help with resolving social problems.”

Asked why he chose to help Russia instead of poor people closer to home, Robert Walker of San Francisco said candidly that he and his wife enjoy the foreign excitement of the Peace Corps.