(FORTUNE Magazine) – Most Westerners don't know it. But beneath the shabby surface of the Eastern bloc's markets lies a technological gold mine. Says Gordon Feller, head of Integrated Strategies, a California consulting firm: ''There are 6,000 R&D institutes in the Soviet Union alone. Together, it and Eastern Europe account for one-third of the world's Ph.D.-level engineers and scientists. They have a huge pool of patents. But they know nothing about how to commercialize their ideas.'' A few hardy prospectors have already struck it rich by heading East. More than two dozen companies have licensed Soviet metallurgical technologies. Highflying U.S. Surgical Corp., whose stock has nearly doubled in the past 12 months, took wing with a surgical stapler invented in the Soviet Union. Bausch & Lomb found its soft contact lenses in Czechoslovakia. Hungary is one of the world's biggest exporters of computer software. Communists create clever playthings too. Remember Rubik's Cube? That was another Hungarian export. Now two Soviet videogames, including the one pictured here, are on sale in the U.S. Coming soon -- Perestroika (the object: to get through a maze guarded by hostile bureaucrats who look like former party leader Leonid Brezhnev and his apparatchiks). John Kiser, author of Communist Entrepreneurs, has been brokering Eastern European brainpower for four years. His new favorite is a top-quality superconducting powder developed by the Soviets, which he is trying to peddle to IBM, among others. ''The Russians can make this stuff in 40 seconds,'' he says. ''It takes days over here.'' Kiser is so keen on a Hungarian expert system used on computers -- it predicts drug toxicity levels, among other things -- that he put his own money into a joint venture called Compudrug to sell it. Upjohn and Sterling Drug are early customers. Warsaw Pact researchers need Western business to cope with a ''peace dividend'' of their own. Defense spending is plunging -- the Russians plan to cut military budgets more than 14% by 1991. Politicians are seeking civilian uses for resources ranging from factories to lab technicians. Feller of Integrated Strategies thinks that ''you might be able to go into a Hungarian institute and get a right of first refusal on all its software and patents'' -- for the right price. If that's so, that price will rise fast. Japanese and Western European companies are digging for deals. Says Feller: ''Those who get there first will draw the map of the market to their advantage.'' -- T.A.S.