MOSCOW — An American exchange student from Brown University has been found dead outside his Moscow dormitory, and although police insist that the death was a suicide, the coroner's report calls it murder.

News reports quoting unnamed faculty members and other sources at the Russian State University for the Humanities suggest that the death of Anthony Riccio, 21, may have been the work of local gangsters who had been renting out space from a university that has a reputation for financial improprieties. But a classmate who found the body said he thought it was an accident.

Police insist that the outgoing and energetic young man who had been studying Russian since grade school hanged himself from a balcony two floors above his dormitory room just 10 days after arriving in Moscow. Riccio's family and classmates call that an unlikely scenario.

Anthony Riccio loved Russia. When he was in grade school, he told his father, "How can we have peace with Russia if we can't speak to them?"

Riccio's death comes on the eve of a U.S.-Russian summit at which Russia's efforts to combat its soaring crime and lawlessness are sure to be on the agenda.

President Boris N. Yeltsin hopes to convince the West that Russia is now stable, ready for full economic partnership and ripe for Western investment.

But first, Western governments need assurances that Russia can stop the dangerous leakage of nuclear materials from the creaky former Soviet military complex. And Western businesses need assurances that Russia is curbing the organized crime that has become a serious threat to economic development here.

"There is only one problem: the bandits. The gangsters," Izvestia economics columnist Mikhail Berger said in an interview last week. "Neither the taxes nor the political risks create problems as serious as the gangsters do. . . . This is a real national problem."

But Riccio's father, John Riccio, said he would not want his son's death to discourage travel and exchange programs in Russia.

"This could have happened in New York City or Boston," Riccio said in a telephone interview from his home in Glastonbury, Conn. "We would support these programs. If we had to do it again, we'd do it again--and Anthony certainly would."

Riccio described his son, who was a junior in the Russian studies program at Brown University in Providence, R.I., as "very effervescent" and "unique."