While the boom in graduate business education cools in the United States, American universities are finding eager new students of capitalism in places like Blagoveschensk, a bustling Russian river port on the Chinese border.

There, for the last six months, Portland State University has been offering an executive master's degree in business administration program to 23 students who hope to export the region's timber, gold and soybeans.

Though they have some difficulties with such topics as "human resource management," all are hungry to compete in the free markets emerging from the collapse of the Soviet economic system.

"They feel they are starting to understand the mentality of business people who come from the West. They are becoming sort of assimilated to what is going on in the rest of the world," said Elena Tihaja-Tishchenko, the Russia-based co-director of the Portland State program in Blagoveschensk.

Portland State sponsors similar schools in partnership with local groups in two other Russian cities: Khabarovsk, also on the Chinese border, and Novgorod, near St. Petersburg.

A few weeks ago, Cal State Hayward began an MBA program in Moscow with 44 students, linked to an economic institute there.

Despite the turmoil among Russian leaders over the direction of economic reform, UC Berkeley expects to help start a business school at the University of St. Petersburg next fall, and other U.S. universities have begun economics programs in the former Soviet bloc or are participating in faculty exchanges.

"They need the most basic information about economic issues," Cal State Hayward President Norma S. Rees said of students she recently met in Moscow. "They have no idea what a lot of these things are, no concept of marketing, of cost, of what role free enterprise has in the economy."

Despite those hurdles, Cal State Hayward's two-year Moscow program tries to follow the school's regular MBA curriculum as closely as possible, Rees said. California faculty will teach some Moscow courses and Hayward students will visit.

After preaching so long about capitalism, U.S. business and management professors feel a strong pull to help Marxist economies change, said Charles Hickman, an official with the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, a national accrediting agency. The group recently helped run a conference in Moscow on "How to Start and Run a Business School."