Soviet Maverick Yeltsin Arrives for U.S. Lecture Tour

Soviet Parliament member Boris N. Yeltsin, who staged a strong political comeback after being fired as Communist Party chief in the city of Moscow, arrived in New York on Saturday and was greeted by a throng of reporters and a crowd of curious tourists. He told them that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s popularity “has been falling somewhat.”

But he declined on his first visit to the United States to be drawn into a discussion of Gorbachev’s government or of difficult ethnic tensions among nationalities in the Soviet Union.

“I came to study American experience with democracy. That is the main thing,” Yeltsin said moments after arriving from Moscow at Kennedy Airport. “I will be talking about the present state of our relations between the two countries. I will talk about how to make a major improvement in these relations. We want to reduce armaments. We want much greater economic cooperation in the area of capital construction and development.

“I want to see the Washington monuments and museums and Congress and other cultural treasures of the United States,” he added. “You have more than 200 years of experience with democratic government. Although it is a bourgeois democracy, you have parliamentary experience in this country. We are just sort of getting out of the egg in that respect. We are trying to get our Supreme Soviet to act as a permanently operating Parliament.”

Yeltsin, whose visit is unofficial, said he would meet with President Bush if an invitation is extended. He is scheduled to hold a formal news conference in New York today and to address the Council on Foreign Relations in Manhattan on Monday night.

At his impromptu airport news conference, Yeltsin, tall, gray-haired and dressed in a conservative blue suit, said that in the Soviet Union, the leadership “does not like the word ‘opposition’ very much. So we call it ‘pluralism.’ But we do have a minority group in the Supreme Soviet.”

In December, 1985, Yeltsin was named to the post of first secretary of Moscow by Gorbachev, who requested that he institute reforms. In October, 1987, however, he made a speech that shocked the Communist Party’s Central Committee, sharply criticizing committee members and arguing that the pace of reforms was too slow. As a result, he was forced to resign his post on the Politburo and was criticized by Gorbachev.

But in March, running against a candidate favored by the Communist Party Establishment, he was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies after receiving more than 6 million votes. When appointments to the Supreme Soviet were made from those elected to the congress, Yeltsin was not initially named. But after voters in Moscow demonstrated for two days, another reform-minded member of the Supreme Soviet resigned and Yeltsin took his seat.

Yeltsin’s itinerary in the United States was still being completed on Saturday.

At the airport, Yeltsin said he would speak in New York, Washington, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. He did not elaborate.