After four and a half years in Moscow, Bruce Bean figures he knows why he and so many other businessmen decided to stick it out, despite the crisis.

"You just get the bug," he said. "You've been in Russia long enough, and you're committed."

As a lawyer, and as chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce, Bean has come to know a lot of businessmen, both executives of multinationals and lone-gun entrepreneurs. Most of them are still around, and what keeps them going now is not just their faith in Russia, but a real need to justify that faith to investors, bosses and shareholders back home.

"You've made all these speeches, and you don't have very much to show for it," he said. "If you invested your own money, you're hard pressed to show a profit."

Most of those businessmen are convinced that with time - and with the help of lawyers like Bean - they can solve their own problems. And Bean believes they're right. Where many of them are wrong, however, is their belief that they, with their shareholders' money, can also solve Russia's problems.

"It isn't foreign money that's going to solve Russia's problems," he said. "Russia is going to solve Russia's problems, and it's going to take a long time."

Bean, 41, first came to Moscow in March, 1995, as a partner at the firm of Coudert Brothers, after 22 years in law, finance and investment banking. Since arriving, he branched out a bit, joining AmCham to make contacts and learn the market, and served as the chairman of the charity United Way Moscow from 1997 to 1998. In June, 1998, he joined Clifford Chance as a partner.

There, he sat at the top of Russia's largest staff of lawyers and realized that Russia already has most of what it needs.

"These are natural litigators," he said of Russian lawyers in general. "They read something and immediately they're looking for the problem. The one thing that this market has to have is a little more litigation. This place will develop a highly litigious class of lawyers."

Bean, who hails from New York, readily admits that in the long run, too much litigation can cause problems, as many say it already has in his home country. But in the meantime, it's the only thing that can help give shape to Russia's amorphous legal system, he said.

- By SAM GREENE