Shopping Child’s Play to Yeltsin

Contrary to published reports, Boris N. Yeltsin, the Communist Party maverick who recently visited the United States on a speaking tour, did not shop till he dropped, an aide said. The total of Yeltsin’s bourgeois purchases, in fact, was a toy pistol and two calculators for his grandchildren for the sum of $24, the aide, P. Voshchanov, said. Earlier this month, in what quickly became known as “the Yeltsin affair,” the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that Yeltsin acted like the United States was “a bar 3,000 miles long, downing two bottles of vodka, four bottles of whiskey and countless cocktails in five days,” and spending his speaking fees on movie videocassettes and other luxury goods. The La Repubblica article was then reprinted in Pravda, prompting outraged denials from Yeltsin. In fact, Voshchanov said in an article recently published in the youth newspaper Komsomovskaya Pravda, Yeltsin did not even want to be paid for his speeches and handed over his speaking fees to aides. “While Yeltsin was delivering his last lecture, which was to end three hours before our departure, me and (aide) Lev Sukhanov rushed to satisfy his ‘insatiable consumer appetites,’ ” Voshchanov said. “We chose a child’s pistol for his grandson, worth $6, and two toy calculators for his two granddaughters, worth $18.” In a rare move, Pravda apologized for the article, apparently in a rebuff to conservatives.

--Author Tom Wolfe’s research into a new novel has taken him into the courtroom, where the “Bonfire of the Vanities” writer is observing a trial involving two real estate developers. “Real estate development is one of the themes I want to elaborate (on) in the novel I’m working on now,” he said. “Along with investment banking, it is one of the two industries that set the tone of the period. Here are two developers in a lawsuit--lots of things in the business will come forth. One of the great things about lawsuits is they tend to pull the covers off of things.” During the trial in Boston, Wolfe also appeared at a convention of the International Council of Shopping Centers, inviting the crowd to tell him anecdotes about the real estate game.

--Veteran U.S. space researcher James A. Van Allen has received the prestigious Crafoord Prize from Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf for his pioneering exploration of space. Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences, which also awards the Nobel science prizes, in particular cited Van Allen’s discovery in 1958 of the Earth’s high-energy radiation belts that were named after him. Van Allen, 74, of the University of Iowa, developed new rockets and space instruments used in launching the first U.S. satellites.