Summit Is Not the Heights for Harried Soviets

Mikhail Sergeyevich, come home! Viktor Shklovsky wants you to explain why there’s no sausage in Soviet stores.

“I do not give a damn about the summit,” the 30-year-old engineer from Moscow exclaimed, his jet-black mustache quivering in anger. “The summit is OK as an idea, but there are so many problems in this country that it would be better for Gorbachev to deal with them and not with this summit, which is not urgent at all.”

For four straight days, state-run Soviet radio, television and newspapers delivered an avalanche of words and images from the other superpower and its capital. People heard President Bush rebuke Mikhail S. Gorbachev for his treatment of Lithuania; they also heard Gorbachev expostulate on why he wants to create a hybrid socialist-market economy.

The Soviets heard, that is, if they were listening, and many admittedly were not. “This summit will not change our lives here,” was how Muscovite Victor Ukhov, 47, summed up the sentiments of his compatriots as he talked in front of a barren state-run vegetable store on Moscow’s Garden Ring Road.

Since the Soviet leader’s Ilyushin 62 lifted off Tuesday, bound for Canada en route to Washington, people here have had plenty besides Kremlin diplomacy to think about. Even Gorbachev’s exit was upstaged by the tumultuous events now commonplace in Soviet politics: That same day, Communist firebrand Boris N. Yeltsin became president of the Russian republic despite a last-ditch attempt by Gorbachev to stop him.

If the big chill is gone from U.S.-Soviet relations, the big thrill of the superpower rapprochement that has been a key goal of Gorbachev’s foreign policy has vanished for many as well. The blase attitude shown by many Soviets interviewed to get their reactions to the second Gorbachev-Bush summit may be a backhanded tribute to how much has been accomplished by the superpowers in the past five years.

Now, many Soviets have apparently stopped worrying about the bomb. What chiefly concerns them at the moment are their government’s planned price hikes, the prospect of being fired and other consequences of the “regulated market” reforms being touted by Gorbachev.

Such topics, they note, were not on the table in Washington.

“The idea of the summit is great, because it promotes disarmament, but it will hardly have an influence on us or mean we have a place to live,” a swarthy Russian in his 60s said Saturday afternoon. A musician, he had to flee his home and job with an orchestra when ethnic massacres erupted in the Caspian port of Baku in January.

Now illegally living in a Moscow dormitory, the viola player kills time during the day by wandering through the halls and corridors of the Byelorussia railway station.

Older Soviets seem anything but nonchalant about the summit, presumably because they recall the Cold War and what from their viewpoint was the encirclement of their country by U.S. military bases.

For them, contact with the Americans and the signing of arms reduction accords is a relief.

“I am happy about the summit because there will be no war,” Nikita F. Kovalev, 70, said simply. In his job as civil defense chief of a Moscow factory, Kovalev must plan, among other things, for the eventuality of a U.S. nuclear attack.

With a dash more caution, the World War II veteran’s view was shared by official Soviet media as they labored to put their spin on the outcome of the Washington summit, or, as the Russians put it, “the meeting at the heights.”

“The state visit by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to the U.S. and his meetings with President George Bush have brought encouraging results which will help bring closer a world without wars and weapons,” Vladimir Bogachev, military affairs writer for the official Tass news agency, wrote in a commentary.

On Saturday night, the TV news program “Vremya,” ordinarily 30 minutes long, devoted 35 minutes to farewell ceremonies at the White House for Gorbachev and showed the frenzied welcome given his wife, Raisa, when she addressed graduates at Wellesley College.

According to the more Machiavellian school of Kremlinology, Gorbachev, beleaguered with domestic problems, uses his overseas encounters with foreign dignitaries and crowds, which are lavishly shown on Soviet TV, as a tool to boost his standing at home.

That might have been successful once, but in Year 6 of Gorbachev’s perestroika reforms, it has dubious success.

“The Washington meeting will hardly influence his popularity,” said Ukhov, an avowed partisan of Yeltsin. “Gorbachev has already lost his authority among the people, and they do not support him anymore.”

Such a pat statement is debatable, but Gorbachev would not get the same rousing ovation inside the Garden Ring Road that he did inside Washington’s Beltway. “The peak of his popularity passed in 1987-88, and it is still declining,” said Dmitri Pavlov, 24, a student at Moscow State University, Gorbachev’s alma mater.

Other domestic concerns also have turned Soviet heads away from the televised images arriving from Washington. Moscow and cities surrounding it have been locked in what might be termed a colossal “food fight.” Moscow has shut its shops for two weeks to out-of-towners to halt panic buying caused by the Kremlin’s price reform plan, and the out-of-towners are striking back by stopping shipments of meat, milk--even vodka--to the 9 million consumers in the capital.