NONFICTION - Nov. 29, 1992

MOSCOW MEETS MADISON AVENUE by Gary Burandt with Nancy Giges (HarperCollins: $22.50; 256 pp.) It’s a premise fraught with comic possibilities. According to Young & Rubicam executive Burandt, Lenin called ad men the leeches of capitalism. A 1940s edition of the Soviet Encyclopedia equated the profession with swindling. The issue, in what was still the Soviet Union when Burandt was there, was simply to acquire the basic necessities, which often involved standing in various lines for three hours a day. What better place to plunk down an American ad agency? It was the promised land, so Young & Rubicam, whose client list included Johnson & Johnson, General Electric and Colgate-Palmolive, decided to move there and get ready to introduce products to what would unquestionably be a hungry consumer audience. The authors, a Y&R; executive and an Advertising Age reporter, have attempted to turn Burandt’s journals into a chronicle of that year, with intermittent success. The story of how the Moscow office finally got its telex machine is amusingly told, but too often the authors tell us that something was funny and then walk away from the incident without exploiting it. One wishes for a John Gregory Dunne, a David McClintick, a writer who appreciates the power of a dramatic scene--and for a sensibility a bit less self-impressed than the one that informs this book.