DIED. Armand Hammer, 92, quintessential entrepreneur and pioneer of trade with the Soviet Union; in Los Angeles. Hammer, who was trained as a physician but never practiced, went to the famine-stricken Soviet Union in 1921 and made the first of many deals with the Soviets by arranging a barter of furs and caviar for American wheat. Living in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, he bought up much of the czarist art holdings and eventually acquired one of the world's great private collections. Hammer hobnobbed with Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev and was a tireless spokesman for better U.S.-Soviet relations. In the 1950s he invested in the tiny Occidental Petroleum Corp. and transformed it into a $20 billion conglomerate. Reared in a nonobservant Jewish family, he died the night before he was to celebrate his belated Bar Mitzvah.