MILITARY : Russian Defense Industry Adopts Capitalist Strategy : Marketing plans? Warranties? Even former enemies can become customers in post-Cold War arms sales.

One sure sign the Cold War is really over: Russia now offers cash-paying customers a 10-year warranty on its latest surface-to-air missile.

The mobile, high-speed S-300 PMU-1 air defense system, a rival of the American Patriot missile, is one of Moscow’s hot new exports. Its creators claim that it can fend off “any type of air attack” within a radius of 95 miles and hit six targets at once.

Eager to prove its superiority, Russia will test the weapon directly against Western competitors for the first time next week at the First International Defense Exhibition in Abu Dhabi, along with 369 other specimens of Russian military hardware from T-80 tanks to Kalashnikov rifles.

“We will be competing with other weapons systems, not in a war, but in a test range, for peaceful purposes,” Boris V. Bunkin, designer of the S-300 missiles, said this week. “We hope that contracts will be signed, because we need them very badly.”

Under Soviet rule, the military-industrial complex operated in secrecy. Marketing was an alien concept; the Soviets practically gave away weapons to East European and Third World nations in an effort to extend the Kremlin’s military influence.

Now, with the Soviet Union dissolved and the post-Communist economy in decline, Russia wants cash, not influence. It is hustling its most advanced planes, tanks and missiles to practically anyone who will pay hard currency--even former enemies.

Fearing mass unemployment, President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government has backed away from a goal to convert most of its huge defense industry--1,700 companies and 200 research centers employing 6 million workers--to civilian use. Under current plans, 60% of those plants would keep making military hardware and use the profits to convert the rest.

Selling is the challenge. Russia has lost important arms markets in Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia after joining international sanctions against those former clients. Viktor K. Glukhikh, chairman of the Committee for Defense Industries, says Russia is trying to compensate with an aggressive trading policy that lacks “political coloring.”

Russia is boosting weapons sales to old clients like India and China, he said, and exploring new markets: Malaysia, Iran, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and South Africa. It is selling helicopters and armored personnel carriers to Turkey, a member of NATO.

U.S. officials have expressed concern--but have not sought to halt--Russia’s transfer of high- technology weapons systems to China and its delivery of a submarine to Iran.

In an interview with the newspaper Izvestia this week, Sergei Karaoglanov, head of Russia’s arms export monopoly Oboronoexport, said that its sales are carefully managed so as not to “upset the balance of regional forces or form the basis for potential aggression.”

So far sales have been slow, in part because the Russians are charging so much. For example, the price of a MIG-27 jet fighter, shown at a Russian air show in August was $40 million. By last week, the price had dropped to $16 million at an arms sale in Ukraine.

Glukhikh estimated that Russia made $3 billion from arms exports last year but could earn $11 billion a year through more effective salesmanship.

“We want to show that our defense industries have not collapsed but are capable of making modern weapons that people need,” he told reporters, outlining plans for the exhibition.

In a warm-up for the show, Russia’s military-industrial elite gave a public display of its newly honed capitalist trading skills.

“Ammunition produced by Bazalt is used by 41 armies in the world,” boasted Anatoly S. Olukhov, general director of the NPO Bazalt Research and Production Assn. “Whenever you see a man holding a grenade-launcher on your TV screen, you can be sure that these grenades were designed and produced by NPO Bazalt.”

Attention, Shoppers

Prices for Russian military hardware currently for sale at a major weapons market in Ukraine:

Commodity Production date Price MIG-27K fighter plane 1988-90 $16 million Yakovlev-28 bomber 1985-88 $13 million Sukhoi-27SK fighter plane New $31 million Ilyushin-76TD transport plane New $32 million MI-24 combat helicopter New $7 million S-300V anti-aircraft system New $650,000 T-80V tank New $2.2 million R-3305 radio jammer New $30,300 123-millimeter howitzer 1968-74 $50,000 Kilo-class diesel submarine 1992 $130,000 BTR-8S armored personnel carrier New $300,337 Strela-10M missile New $30,000