Soviets Use Influence to Try to Get Iraq to Quit : Diplomacy: But Moscow, once Baghdad’s ally and military supplier, says it has received no response to its appeal.

The Soviet Union is playing an unusual, behind-the-scenes diplomatic role in the Persian Gulf War, trying to use its remaining leverage in Iraq to persuade President Saddam Hussein to quit fighting--and offering to carry the surrender message from Baghdad to Washington if he does.

“I hope that (the Iraqis) realize, if they decide it’s time to call it quits, that we are there,” Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Vitaly I. Churkin said in Moscow on Saturday.

“We continue to maintain constant contacts with Baghdad, but we have not received any response to our appeals,” he told reporters.

Moscow’s ambassador in Iraq, Viktor V. Posuvalyuk, went to one of Hussein’s military command bunkers in Baghdad on Friday, the day after U.S.-led forces began bombing the country, to give the Iraqi leader a chance to ask for a cease-fire, diplomats said. But the envoy was sent away empty-handed, U.S. officials said.

Ambassador Posuvalyuk has not met with Hussein since Jan. 8, Churkin said.

The Soviet government also sent appeals to Israel, several Arab countries and the Palestine Liberation Organization, urging them to refrain from turning the war into an Arab-Israeli conflict.

Later on Friday, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev telephoned President Bush and, in a 45-minute conversation, outlined his contacts with the Iraqis, a senior U.S. official said.

“Gorbachev wanted to send a message that he is active diplomatically but supports very strongly this gulf (military operation),” the U.S. official said. “He was doing what he does best, which is diplomacy.”

Bush and his aides have no serious objection to Gorbachev’s diplomatic contacts with Baghdad, another official said, because the Soviets have strongly supported the U.S. decision to use force to compel Iraq to end its occupation of Kuwait.

Still, he acknowledged, some officials remain “nervous” about the possibility that the Soviet Union might seek a negotiated settlement that would fall short of the basic U.S. aim, a complete and unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait.

Asked why Gorbachev has plunged into diplomatic action at a time when there appears to be little prospect for a peaceful resolution of the gulf crisis, one senior official paused and said, carefully: “I don’t know about his motives.”

Gorbachev has given public support to U.S. actions in the gulf even as the Bush Administration has strongly criticized the Soviet government’s violent crackdown against the independence-seeking government of Lithuania.

The Soviet Union has been a major ally and military supplier of Iraq for two decades; the Scud missiles that Iraq launched against Israel last week were originally bought from Moscow.

But those ingredients have not translated into much visible political leverage in Baghdad. Gorbachev sent a deputy foreign minister, Yevgeny M. Primakov, to Baghdad several times last fall to seek a peaceful solution to the gulf crisis, but the missions produced no results.

Until recently, thousands of Soviet advisers and technicians were in Iraq, including an unknown number of military advisers.

Soviet Vice President Gennady I. Yanayev said that Gorbachev has called for the evacuation of all Soviet citizens still in the country as soon as possible. A Moscow newspaper put the number of Soviets in Iraq at 112, including 78 members of the Soviet Embassy staff and 34 non-military technicians.

Yanayev said none of the Soviet citizens has been injured in the war.

McManus reported from Washington and Shogren from Moscow.