MOSCOW, June 3— Svyatoslav N. Fyodorov, a pioneering eye surgeon who was one of the Soviet Union's first practicing capitalists and a politician who ran for president of Russia in 1996, died on Friday in a helicopter crash outside of Moscow. He was 72.

Dr. Fyodorov was returning from a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of one of his eye microsurgery clinics in Tambov, 250 miles southeast of Moscow. Television footage filmed there showed him climbing into one of the helicopter's pilot seats.

The NTV television channel reported that helicopter piloting, along with motorcycle racing, was one of the latest hobbies of a man who never allowed physical challenges -- as a youth, he lost a foot in an accident at aviation school -- to hinder his pursuit of sport.

Three others died in the crash, all reportedly crew members. There was no explosion, witnesses said.

The stocky, spike-haired Dr. Fyodorov, who enrolled in medical school after the aviation school accident, was a man of many skills with one overriding passion: eye surgery. After the Soviet president, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, undertook economic and political reforms in the 1980's, Dr. Fyodorov's deftness as a surgeon and talent as a businessman made him an a national and international symbol of those changes.

Born in Ukraine in 1927, he graduated from medical institute in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don and worked in hospitals around Russia.

In 1960, he implanted the first artificial crystalline lens. In 1973, already in Moscow, he developed one of the first operations for early treatment of glaucoma.

Dr. Fyodorov's best known technique was an operation for myopia that involved precise incisions near the cornea.

The theory behind the procedure was that eyesight normalizes, sometimes fully, as the incisions heal and the curvature of the cornea alters.

Although greeted with much skepticism, the operation was also wildly popular. Dr. Fyodorov's high-tech assembly-line operating rooms, filled with the latest equipment custom-made by Siemens in Germany, made it possible to operate on hundreds of patients a day at his Research Institute of Eye and Microsurgery in Moscow. Dr. Fyodorov spoke of automating other surgical procedures, even coronary bypass, in the same fashion. In the myopia surgery, patients on operating tables rotated from one doctor to another, each responsible for part of the procedures, which were completed in about 15 minutes.

Russian television reported that he had clinics in Italy, Poland and Yemen, and a clinic on board a ship cruising the Mediterranean. His business interests expanded to other spheres as well, such as farming.

In the late 1980's and early 1990's, Dr. Fyodorov called for repeal of the one-party system while still a member of the Communist Party and before the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In that year, Dr. Fyodorov turned down an offer from Boris N. Yeltsin, Russia's president, to become premier. By 1992, he was cochairman of the Party of Economic Freedom, an early incarnation of the many liberal parties that have failed so far to make a large impact on Russia's political scene. Eventually, Dr. Fyodorov entered Parliament, in 1995, as head of his own small party.

However, when he ran for president in 1996, Dr. Fyodorov received barely 1 percent of the national vote.

For all of his business acumen, Dr. Fyodorov was far from the stereotype of ruthless capitalist, or the brashness displayed by many businessmen in what has come to be known as the ''new Russia.'' Nor, for all of his stated disappointment in the rocky course of economic reform, was he nostalgic for Communist restoration.

In his last recorded statement, his speech to the staff of the Tambov clinic, he set forth a vision he embodied -- of a Russia proud, capable and caring of its people.

''We have one goal,'' Dr. Fyodorov said. ''To make it so that people live well, so that they see well. So that they live well in this clinic, in Tambov, in other places in the country.''

''And I think that we today with our practice are proving the potential of the Russian people, the potential of its talents, the potential of self-organization, the potential of enterprises being self-sufficient, the potential of regions being self-sufficient, he said.''

Dr. Fyodorov is survived by his wife and four daughters.

Photo: Dr. Svyatoslav N. Fyodorov at one of his eye clinics in Moscow. He developed surgery for myopia and ran for president of Russia in 1996. (Reuters, 1988)