More U.S. Firms Hiring Former Soviet Scientists : Research: AT&T; and Corning are the latest to snap up the world-class talent, which is available because jobs in the new republics are hard to come by.

For roughly the annual salary of a single American scientist, American Telephone & Telegraph has hired 100 Russian researchers at a prestigious Moscow physics institute, the company said Tuesday.

Separately, Corning Inc. said it had signed a similar deal involving 100 scientists at two research centers in St. Petersburg.

The agreements are part of an accelerating effort by U.S. companies to tap low-cost scientific talent in the former Soviet Union, whose vast, state-sponsored research establishment is crumbling for lack of funds. This has created a buyers’ market for Western companies seeking inexpensive ways to augment their research programs.

AT&T; will gain the services of 100 General Physics Institute scientists and technicians specializing in fiber-optic cables, the thin strands of glass that can carry thousands of simultaneous telephone calls. It will pay the researchers $60 a month--somewhat more than most government scientists make. The company will also provide funds for equipment purchases and travel to the United States.

Kumar Patel, executive director of AT&T;’s Bell Laboratories and negotiator of the deal, said the value of the one-year, renewable agreement was in the “low six figures,” or several hundred thousand dollars. The Russians will augment the efforts of about 100 Bell Labs researchers in New Jersey who are working on fiber-optic technology.

The General Physics Institute, headed by Nobel Prize-winning physicist A. M. Prokhorov, is a division of the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences. Patel said the institute is “the world leader” in the development of high-strength fiber-optic cables and also has expertise in metal coatings for those cables.

Corning will employ about 100 scientists at the Institute for Silicate Chemistry and the Institute of Optical Materials Sciences. The scientists will do basic research on glass. The company did not disclose the salaries that will be paid, but a spokesman said they would be “comparable” to what AT&T; is paying.

George Beall, a research fellow at Corning, noted that the Optical Materials Institute was once devoted to military work. “I was there about a month ago, and you could see that at one time it was a highly secret area,” he said. “But it’s all been opened up now.”

In March, Sun Microsystems announced that it had hired a team of 50 computer scientists who had helped the Soviet military develop supercomputers. And the U.S. government is now employing more than 100 nuclear fusion scientists at an atomic energy research institute in Moscow.

Analysts say more such deals are likely as researchers in Russia and other nations of the former Soviet Union search for ways to continue their work in the face of devastating inflation and budget cuts.

“They’re desperate,” said Arthur Alexander, a former Soviet technology analyst for Rand Corp. who is now president of the Japan Economic Foundation. “These institutes depended on the state for 80% of their funding, and the state budget component has just collapsed.”

Citing a 1985 CIA study, Alexander said the Academy of Sciences alone had more than 200,000 employees--including more than 70,000 scientists. That represents just 10% of the former Soviet Union’s scientific talent.