HOW to Succeed As a Socialist Banker

East-West trade already is clipping along at a $10 billion rate this year. Although more of the goods involved, from Renault and Fiat cars to a U.S. petroleum-cracking plant, are Eastbound, the Communists still stand to make money out of the deals. No Western bank is allowed a branch in Moscow, but the Russians already have banks in London, Paris and Beirut that earn attractive commissions by cutting red tape, handling paper work and removing the risk for Western exporters by discounting their bills in advance. Now, with trade on the increase, they have opened a new bank in Zurich.

Sunrise Serenade. The Zurich bank, which occupies sleek second-floor offices on the Schuetzengasse, is a Swiss-chartered joint stock company with initial assets of $2.3 million. It has been christened Wozchod Handelsbank, or Sunrise Commercial Bank; Chairman Albert Nikolaevich Belishchenko, 36, a career banker who was formerly vice-director of Moscow's Gosbank, says the name refers to the spaceships that the Russians launched in 1964 and 1965. Belishchenko takes pains to allay Swiss fears that Moscow will use the bank to dump gold and otherwise disrupt the tiny nation's financial ties to other Western countries. "The Soviet government wants to trade with all countries willing to trade with it," says he. "We are here to help finance this trade."

The Wozchod bank, financing exports from Switzerland, Italy, West Germany and Scandinavia, will thus parallel the activities of Russian banks already established in the West. The biggest of these is the Narodny Bank of London, established in 1911 and now the busy occupant of an eight-story building in London's City. The Narodny bank does 90% of its business in East-West trade transactions, discounts (at a fat commission) bills of sale of Western exporters who have shipped East; by doing so, it saves them a three-to six-month wait for money and makes trade with the East block more attractive. With $650 million in assets, the Narodny also makes local municipal loans, invests in British government bonds.

Local Touch. Along with the Narodny bank, which also has a highly successful Middle East branch in Beirut, the Russians operate the Banque Commerciale pour 1'Europe du Nord in Paris. Founded in 1921 by expatriate White Russians, the B.C.E.N.--as Parisians call it--was sold to the Communist government in 1925, has since become a major Paris bank and has assets of $624 million. Like the new Wozchod bank in Switzerland, the B.C.E.N. operates with a mainly local board; the president is Guy de Boysson, 45, a French nobleman who once held Communist Party membership.

The Russian banks in the West all rack up tidy annual profits, and they may soon do even better. The Communist bloc, which once operated under a primitive barter system with the West in which each nation accumulated Western currencies on its own, now has a joint International Bank for Economic Cooperation. The bank operates as a kind of Communist central bank, switches currencies among member countries in order to improve trade. The bank's delegates will soon arrive in Zurich to confer with the Wozchod bank with a view to stimulating such trade even more.

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