Trading Places : Perestroika: A Soviet intellectual says the U. S. must turn its attention from events in the Soviet Union and do a little soul-searching of its own.

For Sergey Plekhanov, 1969 was his introduction to a freer form of enterprise on the dingier side of capitalism.

Five Brooklyn teen-agers tried to mug him for his watch.

Functioning more on naivete than nerve, Plekhanov told them it was a Russian watch. It was the only one of its kind in New York, he added, and therefore of little value to any fence.

Impressed by his grasp of the economics of their trade, the Prospect Park roughs tossed a few rocks at Plekhanov and left man and watch intact.

Plekhanov continues to impress others with his logic.

Only these days, nobody throws rocks at Sergey Plekhanov--deputy director of the Institute of U. S. and Canadian Studies at the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, a television analyst and eloquent spokesman for the democratization of the Soviet Union. Not even when he suggests that, with the Soviet Union in freer, more peaceful order, it might be time for the United States to exercise a little perestroika .

“Whenever I look at statistics of American society, I see a lot of problems which are not solved, and a lot of needs that are not being met,” he said.

Plekhanov, 43, knows the essential arithmetic: $295 billion spent by the U.S. military in 1989; drug abuse that costs Ameri can taxpayers $200 billion a year; an embarrassing illiteracy rate; estimates of more than 1 million homeless Americans; and “crime . . . at a much higher level than it is in the Soviet Union.

“I’ve been observing America for 20 years now, and I do not see much progress toward solution of those problems. In 1970, when I first came to America, it seemed a better and more human place. Although I understand there have been some progressive changes, there has also been a regression in the way people think about the future of America.”

Interviewed after a 14-hour parade of cafeteria meetings with students and dinner presentations Tuesday to faculty and guests at UC Irvine, Plekhanov acknowledged that the history of the Soviet Union hasn’t exactly been a bowl of caviar either.

There was Stalin’s corruption of Leninism and a dictatorship since proved murderous. Chernobyl has become an icon to nuclear negligence, and Plekhanov’s debit list grows longer: “Persecution of dissidents . . . sending troops to Czechoslovakia, sending troops to Afghanistan . . . constraints on immigration, and not only Jewish immigration.”

But on the other side of the ruble, the U. S. traditionally spends more on public health than does the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union doesn’t have the legacy of Vietnam; the United States has a better record on civil rights.

“Having spent more than a year in New York, I recognize that maybe the United States has gone further in coming to grips with a multiracial society than any other country,” Plekhanov said. “The prejudice is still there. But look at the practical experience of living side by side and actually overcoming that prejudice, squeezing it out of yourself.

“For that, you need the right kind of a climate, and the civil rights movement, I think, was a powerful, liberating thing for the American psychology, for the American consciousness.”

Now, he believes, that consciousness could be redirected toward an American reformation. The nation, he feels, has lost much of its “very healthy . . . self-critical attitude” of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Priorities in federal funding remain heavily rooted in “artificial fears, . . . yesterday’s agendas.”

“But we (in the Soviet Union) are having our perestroika, “ he continued. “We have started attacking the postulates of the old order in the Soviet Union.

“To some people, it is terrible. . . . They say: ‘Oh, this is the end of everything because this is radical critique.’ But radical critique is like surgery, which is necessary when you know that the roots of your disease require such a surgery.”

When Plekhanov, a graduate of the Moscow Institute of International Relations, first came to the United States, it was as an intern for the Soviet delegation to the United Nations.

His stay produced a thesis on the birth and growth of American right-wing politics. It also saw development of a passion for the folk music of Pete Seeger, playing jazz piano in pursuit of Fats Waller and guitar after Wes Montgomery.

In the two decades since--and after his knowledge of Seeger was considered credential enough for a junior research post with the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies--only Stolichnaya vodka has visited more corners of America.

Plekhanov was hired by CBS for last year’s Malta Summit, playing analyst to Dan Rather’s anchor. He was on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s team of Soviet-American experts at the Geneva Summit. He goes back to CBS in June, when Gorbachev meets President George Bush in Washington.

The lighter Plekhanov wears Hungarian sport coats, Italian shirts, American silk neckties and Spanish slacks. “But the underwear is from the Soviet Union,” he says. “It is very comfortable.”

He knows all the lyrics of Phil Ochs’ “Talking Birmingham Jam” and interrupted this week’s trip to San Diego for two hours of personal pleasure--prowling the tall ship “Star of India.”

And his English is so American, so correct to vernacular, buzzwords and mild blasphemies, that his boss, Georgy Arbatov, once joked that institute workers suspect Plekhanov might be a CIA plant.

Yet, these days, there is little time for fun, even less for a wife and two children in Moscow, as Plekhanov is courted heavily and internationally by those seeking his rare intellect for focusing a path through entangled superpowers.

But even Plekhanov must rush to keep up. Tuesday’s news of Gorbachev’s proposal for a Western-style presidency had passed the Supreme Soviet and was a lunch question from his audience before Plekhanov had even heard details of the vote.

Five years ago, he said, democratization was a topic that the wise dared not whisper in Moscow. On Sunday, the head of his institute was openly condemning Soviet defense expenditures and the futility of attempting political ends by military means in an article appearing in the Los Angeles Times.

Reduced military spending, Plekhanov believes, is key to future progress in both countries. “It is obscene for the United States and for the Soviet Union to spend so much and to continue to spend so much on defense against each other.

“I think this is a great contradiction of world politics. The Cold War is over, but the military budgets are still swollen and we are far too slow in bringing them down.”

So if there were a perestroika in the United States, he said, it would also mean “changing your foreign policy and the way you look at the outside world.”

Plekhanov also sees the United States on the cusp of a crisis. There was one in the Depression of the ‘20s and ‘30s, “but then came Roosevelt and the nationwide movement for change.” The ‘70s produced the deep division of Vietnam and “a terrible racial problem, a problem of dissent and coping with dissent . . . not spending enough on social problems and spending too much on the war in Vietnam.

“But you pulled out of that.”

The ‘80s and the Reagan era, he believes, created “the illusion . . . that just unshackling private initiative” would produce security and prosperity.

“But you’ve woken up and the world is not as beautiful as it seemed. It turns out that many problems have not been solved and many new problems have been created, and suddenly the heroes of the Reagan boom are winding up in jail or in bankruptcy court.”

Concurrently, domestic industry is being crippled by economic competition from overseas. The need now, he said, is for the United States to break loose from “a tremendous under-investment in human capital.

“If you want to become competitive, you have to invest much more in human beings in order to retrain the labor force, in order to find new incentives to improve productivity.”

Then, he said, the United States will be better equipped to join the world against a new threat of extinction from global deterioration of the environment.

Whether nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1946 or malathion spraying in Los Angeles in 1990, Plekhanov said, “scientists have led us down the garden path” into a “sacred belief in progress and that they are so smart.”

Also to blame are “a lot of people who think that producing wealth, producing goods and services, becoming powerful in terms of economic power, is the most important thing.”

His own children, he noted, have developed allergies never suffered by their parents. Could it be that in conception, he asked, mother and father transferred “some poisons . . . because we drank the wrong kind of water, we breathed the wrong kind of air or ate the wrong kind of fruits and meats?”

“The best brains, the most committed people and a great sense of outrage” will be required to cease, much less resolve such problems, he said, adding that his personal proposal is to divert money from the Soviet-American arms race and invest them “into ecology-saving technologies, into joint actions to stop this murder of the planet.

“I would like to see us Russians become leaders in a worldwide green movement, if only because the ecological crisis is very severe in the Soviet Union. The greening of the Soviet Union. That’s what we need.”

But his concern about modern foods, the environment and humanity would not extend to a ban on Moscow’s newest attraction--a McDonalds restaurant.

Plekhanov does not see Beeg Mak Gamburgers as an intrusion of capitalism.

“Fast food for the masses,” he said. “Pure Leninism. McDonalds should have been there in 1920.”