MOSCOW, Oct. 17 — In the old days, Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat walked the halls as guests of Patrice Lumumba University. And in the dormitories, the talk among students was of revolution and of radical plots to shake off colonial and imperial masters.

''We were idealists,'' said Valery A. Belov, a Russian law professor who graduated from the university in 1973. ''We thought we could change the world.''

Created by the Soviet Communist Party in 1960, Patrice Lumumba University had as its main mission to recruit and train students from developing countries. It was hoped that those young men and women, who studied free of charge, might ultimately carry the Communist revolution across the third world. The school was renamed for Mr. Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of Zaire, after he was killed during a coup backed by the United States in 1961.

But when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, so did much of the university's funding. Scholarships dried up, and poor foreign students stopped coming.

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The welcome that the young foreigners once received from Russians, who viewed the students as allies in the battle against capitalism, is also strained.

''The Soviet hope was that these students would go back and become spokesmen for the Russian view of the world,'' said Elizabeth K. Valkenier, an American who is a resident scholar at Columbia University's Harriman Institute of Russian Studies. ''Together, they were going to strangle the West.''

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For while few of the university's students set off Communist revolutions, many have become respected political and scientific leaders in their countries. They include doctors in Japan, economists in Chile, politicians in Mexico and engineers in Nigeria.