Moscow Circus: Flurry of Peace Maneuvers Brings Confusion

At 2:23 p.m. Friday, the English-language Tass newsprinter spit out a message that ignited near-panic in newsrooms all over town: Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev would be meeting the press in about an hour and a half.

Correspondents starved for information about the final outcome of last-minute Soviet-Iraqi diplomacy sped through Moscow’s slushy streets to the Foreign Ministry press center. Gorbachev, they reasoned, would be giving one of his rare Moscow news conferences for one reason only: to announce formal Iraqi acceptance of his Persian Gulf peace plan.

The journalists were dead wrong. The 59-year-old Soviet president, whose appearance had been scheduled around 4 p.m., according to Tass, never showed up.

Instead, the bleary-eyed Foreign Ministry spokesman, Vitaly I. Churkin, took the floor with a precisely stated but confounding explanation of where the Iraqi-Soviet talks, which had begun at a few minutes after midnight in the Kremlin, now stood.

When a reporter tried to ask two questions at once, Churkin asked her to give them one at a time and confessed that his brain was not very quick because he, like many of the reporters, had had only two hours of sleep.

“This situation is so complicated, at least partly due to the fact that there are all sorts of suspicions on both sides,” Churkin said.

It seemed to be the understatement of the month.

Churkin’s glib but deadpan demeanor was a stark contrast to the smile flashed by Gorbachev’s spokesman, Vitaly N. Ignatenko, in the same room 14 hours earlier when he announced Iraq’s “positive” reply to the Soviet peace proposals.

“Last night, Mr. Ignatenko was very happy and was really prepared to dance the flamenco, and it seemed from his words that the war was practically over,” a reporter from the Spanish newspaper El Mundo said to Churkin. “Several hours later, you arrive looking like you are going to a funeral. Does that mean (peacemaking) attempts have failed and that Gorbachev has failed to come to the briefing because he is no longer a great winner?”

Churkin, displaying his customary cool head, sidestepped the question but said in passing that it reinforced his image of the Spanish as a “temperamental and life-loving” people.

The confusion Friday afternoon focused on exactly what the Iraqis had agreed to, and whether there had been a change of heart. Visiting Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz and his Soviet counterpart, Alexander A. Bessmertnykh, closeted themselves inside a government guest house for 2 1/2 hours. According to Churkin, the eight-point plan that Ignatenko said had drawn a positive response from Aziz during his earlier talks with Gorbachev was now “history,” a thing of the past.

That would have seemed clear enough: Friday afternoon’s news was “Soviet-Iraq Talks Hit Snag.” But Churkin also said that under instructions from Gorbachev, the eight-point plan had become the “point of departure” for the new round of negotiations, and there, “tangible progress has been made.”

“Just what does that mean?” seemed to be the mystified reporters’ general reaction.

The West hadn’t understood the negotiations, Churkin said. Later, bantering with reporters in English, the spokesman, who formerly served at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, said the source of the misunderstanding had been the press.

“You’re surrounded,” one American reporter cautioned Churkin in mock seriousness, referring to the crush of journalists encircling him. Churkin burst into laughter.

Meanwhile, what was going on in the Soviet-Iraqi talks? The reaction abroad to the seemingly intentional official gobbledygook was both hope and confusion, a late-night television news broadcast said.

“Contradictory information has been coming from behind the Kremlin walls,” the broadcast acknowledged.

Foreigners weren’t the only people confused. At the United Nations, where the Security Council had expected to be briefed by the Soviet Union on the peace plan, diplomats were biding their time. The Soviet ambassador, Yuli M. Vorontsov, hadn’t yet received his instructions from Moscow, they said.

But at 9:27 p.m., the Tass English printer sprang to life again: Ignatenko would be addressing the press anew at 9:30 p.m. Once again, correspondents raced through Moscow’s slippery streets to the press center.

This time, it seemed, the pieces had fallen into place. The Iraqi foreign minister and the Soviet Union had agreed this time on a new six-point plan for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait, Ignatenko, smiling again, announced. The plan had been sent to Baghdad for final approval by Saddam Hussein.

For the inveterate skeptics in the Moscow press corps, it was an eerie instance of deja vu, and Ignatenko seemed to sense it.

“We won’t be bothering you any more today,” the Soviet spokesman promised.