U.S. Aid Improves Few Russian Lives : Assistance: High expectations among ordinary citizens go unfulfilled. Technical help is slow to bear fruit.

Army Lt. Alexander Maly, a 22-year-old platoon commander, is about to benefit from the Clinton Administration’s multibillion-dollar effort to reform Russia. As far as Maly’s concerned, it’s about time.

After two years in a cramped dormitory, the lieutenant is No. 36 on a waiting list for the 128 free apartments in a twin-tower high-rise, one of six housing projects being built with U.S. aid for officers slated to be discharged from Russia’s shrinking army.

If all goes as planned, in July he and his wife will move into a new three-room apartment overlooking a lake in an upscale neighborhood of the city of Nizhny Novgorod. Then he will leave the army and try to launch his own business.

There is little doubt that the young couple will get their promised new life. The $6-million pilot housing program, announced when President Clinton first met with President Boris N. Yeltsin in Vancouver, Canada, last April, is moving along more or less on schedule.

But as Clinton and Yeltsin begin another summit meeting today, it is one of the few examples of American aid with a promise of immediate payoff for ordinary Russians. And even this program is minuscule compared to the expectations it has raised.

Since the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, the United States has given Russia more than $4 billion in direct assistance, much of it technical aid that will be slow to bear fruit. It has also orchestrated a $43-billion Western aid package to be channeled mostly through international financial agencies.

Nevertheless, Yeltsin spokesman Vyacheslav V. Kostikov complained on the eve of Clinton’s arrival that the aid effort pales next to the Marshall Plan launched by the United States to rebuild Europe after World War II.

“Every family felt that aid,” Kostikov said in an interview. “In Russia, on the other hand, there is not yet a single family that can say, ‘Yes, the Americans helped me and made my life better.’ ”

The housing program launched last spring was designed to meet such criticism. It was based on a simple formula: Russians have timber, cement and newly private construction companies; Americans have money and know-how; together they can help close Russia’s deficit of about 10 million homes.

In its initial phase, the program is designed to satisfy another mutual goal--the reduction of Russia’s army and the withdrawal of the 20,000 troops still based in the now-independent Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia.

Riddled by poor morale, the army has balked at bringing home former Soviet officers from foreign bases or discharging them from the service until it can provide them with homes of their own in Russia. Maly and other officers have been brought back anyway, only to wind up in the dormitories or barracks.

Their frustration boiled over last month when army officers gave a disproportionately high vote to Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, whose neo-fascist party finished second in Russia’s parliamentary elections last month. The result shocked Yeltsin’s reformist government and the West not only because of Zhirinovsky’s views and militarism but because of his opposition to dependence on Western aid.

“Zhirinovsky promised to give higher salaries and quality housing to servicemen who live in ghastly conditions,” Maly said, explaining why he and his army buddies voted for the extremist. “He may not be able to fulfill those promises, but a sweet tale is still better than the bitter truth.”

The lieutenant was quick to add that he welcomes the American promises as well.

“We cannot be ashamed,” he said. “Our country needs to be saved. Clinton has extended a hand of friendship, and we should take it.”

Russian officials now worry that the hand of friendship is too little, too late. They are pressing Washington to launch a promised expansion of the pilot project, which is building 460 homes and apartments in five cities, into a $160-million effort to finance homes for another 5,000 army officers by October, 1995.

“If the project had been launched a year earlier, fewer servicemen would have supported Zhirinovsky,” said Anvar Shamuzafarov, secretary of a government committee coordinating the building project with the U.S. Agency for International Development. “The longer we delay, the more we help the extremists who want to wreck the whole thing.”

U.S. AID officials defend their decision to start small. They note that the pilot program, due for completion this summer but delayed until fall, exposed flaws in planning that would have been costlier had they launched from scratch into mass production.

One lesson they learned was to write contracts to accommodate Russia’s high monthly inflation. Contractors demanded payment in advance, then charged AID extra when the materials they bought turned out to cost more rubles.

Another lesson was to pay more attention to politics in choosing where to build. The Siberian city of Novosibirsk pulled out of the project after forces hostile to reform took power in City Hall in October.

“The project was considered too Yeltsin, too American,” said an AID official, who was forced to find new sites for 180 single-family homes.

The pilot project’s latest experiment is to give 100 army officers vouchers worth about $15,000, the approximate cost of a 700-square-foot home, to pay directly to contractors to build whatever they want. If the system works, 1,000 of the officers benefiting from the expanded program will receive vouchers, while the other 4,000 will be assigned homes built by AID.

Russian officials, while accepting the voucher system, worry that it will drive up housing prices; the Americans hope it will cut out the bureaucracy and stimulate competition in the housing market.