MOSCOW — Combing through the archives of the V. I. Lenin Library, a disenchanted Communist youth worker unearthed a once-banned book that he now hopes will change Russia's future.

The book was long denounced by Soviet officials as "bourgeois," and its author, a foreigner, had once spied against Russia.

With the advent of communism, those who tried to preach the book's message risked prison, even execution. No less a figure than Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife and a respected socialist in her own right, worked to counter its influence.

The book was "Scouting for Boys" by Sir Robert Baden-Powell.

It was in 1987 that Vyacheslav Chernikh, now 23, got his hands on a copy of the 1908 work that gave birth to the worldwide scouting movement. Driven to learn everything he could about scouting, the history major searched libraries and contacted relatives of boys, now long dead, who were scouts when Russia had a czar.

The Russian scouting movement, like so many institutions here, perished with the old regime. With the exception of clusters of emigre youth in America and elsewhere, it has been dead for more than 60 years. But Chernikh and 90 like-minded people from across Russia are determined to resurrect scouting, saying tomorrow's Russia needs it.

"All our economic problems, in my opinion, arise from the fact that so many generations in our country were brought up on Communist ideals," Chernikh, a straight-talking, tousle-haired native of the Volga Valley, said recently. "For the economic reform of Russia, there must be people with a new upbringing, who have been raised in a new spirit."

For three days starting Thursday, probably in an auditorium at Moscow's Youth Institute, scouting's Soviet disciples--many of whom, like Chernikh, were once dissatisfied leaders in official youth organizations--will gather to merge independent local groups that already have more than 5,000 members into what is tentatively called the Russian Union of Scouts.

Attending will be leaders and young members of the Tomsk Stranniki, or Wanderers, who wear black berets, scouts from the Crimean city of Simferopol, the "First Scout Troop" (and the only one) from Tyumen--and Chernikh, who wears a Polish scout shirt and received the rank of "instructor" from Polish scouts whom he befriended while a student in Moscow.