Russian Spin on Yeltsin Ills Recalls Soviets

MOSCOW — As far as the Kremlin’s openness about the health of Russia’s leader is concerned, it can be said that “We’re back in the U.S.S.R.”

It is back to the days when analysts examined television footage for hours to detect if a purported public place was really a hospital room subjected to a little stagecraft.

The time is back when official statements are not exactly untruthful but are more telling in what they leave out than for the few words that are carefully chosen.

Once again, forced to speculate in an information vacuum, scholars, diplomats and journalists here are engaged in endless debates about who is being groomed as heir apparent when the current leader’s days seem so distressingly numbered.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin reportedly returned to the Kremlin for three hours Tuesday. But accounts of his health and appearance were mostly secondhand, and the scurrying to show him in action seemed to prove little more than that he is still breathing.

A Kremlin cameraman was authorized to provide a few seconds of television footage showing a bright-eyed Yeltsin toddling toward Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, then seated at an office table for discussions.

But no sound accompanied the footage, and no one outside the Kremlin inner circle was privy to the rare office visit.

“This situation reminds one of the last days of Konstantin Chernenko,” Sergei Markov, a political analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center, said in comparing Yeltsin’s staged appearances with the heavily edited glimpses Russians got of their last leader to die in office.

After a 13-month stint, the wheezing and frail Chernenko died in March 1985 at age 73.

Recalling one highly choreographed shot of Chernenko congratulating visitors to his “office” on International Women’s Day--two days before his death--Markov said the film was taken at an awkward angle to obscure the fact that the hospitalized leader had no pants on.

Concern about Yeltsin’s health, despite repeated assurances from his aides that his condition is improving, has soared since Friday’s announcement that a Moscow meeting of former Soviet republic leaders had been canceled.

It took on new urgency Monday when the Kremlin acknowledged that the president is still not well enough to make a one-day trip to the Netherlands next week.

On Tuesday, President Clinton sought to downplay the issue--saying at a news conference that he had no private information to contradict Kremlin accounts of Yeltsin’s health and praising the Russian leadership for breaking with Soviet and Russian tradition and publicly discussing the leader’s condition.

Clinton said he expected a summit with Yeltsin to be held in March in Washington, as planned.

“We have a huge, full agenda. And we have been given no impression by the Russians that we aren’t still going to have the . . . meeting in the March time frame,” he said.

But on Monday, White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry had appeared to be trying to ease the pressure on Yeltsin when he suggested at a briefing that the U.S.-Russian meeting might slip to April and be held elsewhere.

Yeltsin’s spokesman, Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky, curtly told journalists at a Kremlin briefing Tuesday that he had “no new information” about any change in plans.

Saying that he is no medical expert and therefore unfit to assess the president’s health, Yastrzhembsky insisted that Yeltsin continues to get better after a bout of double pneumonia this month, quintuple bypass surgery in November and several heart attacks over the last two years.

“Progress is evident. There is an essential difference” between Yeltsin’s appearance Tuesday and the way he looked a week earlier, when Yastrzhembsky last saw him, the spokesman said.

Yeltsin has been to the Kremlin only a handful of times since he won a new four-year term in July. Despite the tape given to television networks on Tuesday--the first pictures of Yeltsin in more than three weeks--concern about his ability to rebound remained high.

Internal political pressures have been mounting on Yeltsin to show that he is still in charge, including a parliamentary attempt to impeach him a week ago and the scheduled departure from the country today of the politician constitutionally designated to replace him: Chernomyrdin.

The prime minister will be spending almost two weeks abroad, first on an official visit to Switzerland, then at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss city of Davos, then in Washington for talks with Vice President Al Gore.

Chernomyrdin’s imminent departure probably compelled Yeltsin and his advisors to demonstrate that the leader is back in the saddle--at least to the extent that he can make a rare visit to his office.

Yeltsin, who will turn 66 on Saturday, is also scheduled to meet with French President Jacques Chirac on Sunday at a country guest house.

French reporters in Moscow have said their Paris headquarters told them that Chirac’s office was asked by the Russians to refrain from inviting journalists along for the trip.

Asked if foreign press could observe the opening minutes of the Yeltsin-Chirac meetings--as was once common practice--Yastrzhembsky told journalists to “send an application.”

German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was the last person outside Yeltsin’s entourage to see the president--in a two-hour meeting Jan. 4.

A few German photographers were allowed to watch their handshake from a distance. No significant exposure of the current Kremlin chief has occurred since before his reelection.