United States Foreign Investments Ussr

A Los Angeles company that makes equipment for dams and other electrical power-generating facilities has entered into a joint venture with two Soviet companies to market large Soviet-built generators and turbines in the United States. Magnetek Inc. is the No. 1 builder of medium-power transformers in the United States, but does not manufacture the industry's biggest power devices--generators and turbines.

Russell D. Williams can claim the distinction of opening the first American discount store in the Soviet Union. All he has to do now is persuade shoppers that two months' pay for a pair of jeans is a bargain. Williams, from Tacoma, Wash., opened the first Ami Market last May as a joint venture in the Soviet Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk. Recently, he opened his second shop on the third floor of the GUM department store in the port city of Vladivostok.

Virtually unnoticed among the many superpower negotiations, the United States and Soviet Union are trying to settle U.S. claims of more than $1 billion on debts that predate the Bolshevik Revolution, including old czarist bonds bought by Americans. Recent U.S.-Soviet commercial talks have focused on Soviet efforts to obtain most-favored-nation trading status, which would enable the Soviets to get the U.S. government credits and loans they need to resuscitate their economy.

SPI Pharmaceuticals Inc., continuing its aggressive expansion into Eastern Europe, said Thursday that it has tentatively agreed to form a joint venture with one of Russia's oldest drug manufacturers. SPI, which is 70% owned by ICN Pharmaceuticals Inc. in Costa Mesa, did not disclose financial details of its agreement with Oktyabr Pharmaceutical Factories, a St. Petersburg company founded in the year 1714.

When Pepsi-Cola went on sale here nearly 15 years ago, the first American consumer product to be sold widely in the Soviet Union, Pepsico faced an unusual marketing problem. How could it create demand for a new product without most of the modern marketing techniques--without television advertising or radio commercials, without big giveaways or supermarket promotions, without the lure of entertainment celebrities or top athletes?

Combustion Engineering Inc. announced in Moscow on Wednesday that it had reached an agreement to help build and manage a multibillion-dollar petrochemical complex in two Western Siberian cities. This is the Stamford-based company's second deal with the Soviet Union in the last six months. In November, the company announced the first Soviet-American joint venture established under the Soviet Union's new policy allowing Western concerns to own a share of Soviet industries.

The Radisson Hotel people are shipping in the furniture, computers and facsimile machines in preparation for the fall opening of the first American-managed hotel in the Soviet Union. The Radisson Slavjanskaya, a 430-room enterprise connected to a 165-suite business center, is a challenge like none other for Radisson, a unit of the $6.2-billion (annual revenue) Carlson Companies of Minneapolis.

Appealing for help to pull the Soviet Union out of its deep economic crisis, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Tuesday promised American companies wide access to the Soviet market and a good return on their investment. "If you get a foothold in the Soviet market, the opportunities will be endless," Gorbachev said as he visited the first full-fledged U.S. trade show to be held in the Soviet Union. "Right now, we are rethinking everything, rearranging everything."

Soviet television viewers could soon be exposed to regular doses of something all too familiar to Westerners: commercials. The prospect arose at a news conference Thursday to announce that the world's biggest advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, has been hired to advise the Soviets on how to attract Western advertisers and their hard currency. The idea is to build up corporate images and familiarize Soviets with the types of products they can expect from President Mikhail S.

As Mikhail S. Gorbachev makes a pitch during his New York visit for more business with the United States, his government is returning to an old Russian standby and once again asking Ford Motor Co. to make cars in the Soviet Union. The immediate story is that the Soviet automotive ministry is talking to Ford about modernizing a 60-year-old car plant in the city of Gorky to manufacture Ford Scorpio models in the Soviet Union.

Magnetek, the Los Angeles-based electrical equipment maker, wrote a new chapter in U.S.-Soviet joint ventures a few months ago with the startling announcement that it would sell Soviet turbines and generators to American operators of hydroelectric dams. The agreement with two Soviet companies marked the first time that a major U.S.-Soviet deal would focus on products for the U.S.--rather than the Soviet--market.

The crumbling, cash-starved Soviet Union wouldn't be on anyone's short list of potential new sources for investment capital, but that hasn't stopped Montgomery Securities from going ahead with the first effort to sell stock in American companies to Soviet citizens.

Caught in a political shuffle in the Soviet Union, an Irvine development company's pioneering hotel and business complex in Moscow is in trouble again. Americom Business Centers Inc. said Monday that the Russian republic's Finance Ministry has terminated a joint venture that built and operated the first U.S.-managed hotel and business center in the Soviet Union.

The Bush Administration plans to encourage U.S. companies to invest millions of dollars of their money and some of their best technology in the Soviet defense industry--to help convert it to civilian production and private enterprise. Donald J. Atwood, deputy U.S.

Benton Oil & Gas Co., an Oxnard energy concern, said it has formed a joint venture with two Russian partners to explore, produce and market oil and natural gas from fields in West Siberia. The joint venture, named Geoilbent, will be based in the town of Tarko-Sale, about 1,500 miles northeast of Moscow. Benton will own 34% of the venture. The two Russian partners, which are arms of the Russian ministries that regulate natural resources, will each own 33%.

An ancient-looking oil rig stood idle as the roughnecks who should have been drilling a new well were busy foraging for mushrooms in the mossy west Siberian forest nearby. The oil workers at Pad No. 32 and the three other Soviet drilling crews at West Varyegan Field in the oil-rich Tyumen region of Siberia were all stalled that day because they had run out of cement. "All we can do is sit and wait," Igor Shokalyuk, 28, the foreman at West Varyegan Pad No.

Charles W. Missler savors the panoramic view from his spacious offices on the seventh floor of a futuristic-looking Irvine office tower. From there, Missler can look past the busy San Diego Freeway to the headquarters of Western Digital Corp., the computer manufacturer he nursed back from bankruptcy in the late 1970s. The view serves both as a reminder of the struggling company he saved and of the sizable personal fortune he made.

Madison Avenue jumped on the glasnost bus in more ways then one Thursday. An American firm that sells advertising space on buses from Los Angeles to New York signed a multimillion-dollar licensing agreement to sell ads on every public bus in Moscow--and a dozen other Soviet cities. By July, Transportation Displays Inc.

The trouble with a lot of the expert analysis on the breakup of the Soviet Union is that it gives too much credit to bureaucracy and too little to the human spirit. "It is feared that the Soviet republics could become economic basket cases," say Washington foreign policy officials--as if 70 years of Moscow central planning hasn't made them basket cases already. One could imagine such experts in 1776 condemning the American colonies for breaking away from the British empire. But some savvy U.S.

Buried in a dusty 1920 Pentagon report is a laudatory evaluation of what may be the least-remembered U.S. foreign intervention. "This expedition affords one of the finest examples in history of honorable, unselfish dealings . . . under very difficult circumstances to be helpful to a people struggling to achieve a new liberty," the Army chief of staff reported. The "expedition," between 1918 and 1920, was the deployment to northern Russia and Siberia of 10,000 U.S.