Yeltsin to Join Gorbachev in Talks With Bush

Hours before the start of the superpower summit, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Monday unexpectedly summoned Russian radical leader Boris N. Yeltsin to join a Soviet negotiating team to face President Bush.

“An important meeting like this should have really important representation,” said Vitaly N. Ignatenko, Gorbachev’s spokesman, in an acknowledgement of the great political stature acquired by the ex-Communist who long was a painful political thorn in Gorbachev’s side.

Gorbachev’s surprise invitation allows Yeltsin, the popularly elected president of Russia, to don the mantle of a world statesman with a role in formulating foreign policy, a distinction that so far has eluded the Siberian who once was mocked in Washington as an intellectual lightweight and bumpkin.

In the hours before Bush’s Monday night arrival aboard Air Force One, Soviet officials were hammering home how much they are counting on this summit--the fourth between Gorbachev and Bush--to move superpower relations beyond disarmament and the eradication of superpower tensions to an economic intertwining that would provide a U.S. jump-start for the sick Soviet economy.

“In my personal view, this is the first (U.S.-Soviet) meeting to take place after the end of the Cold War,” Ignatenko said. “Relations are now on a different level--the level of partnership.”

Appearing on Soviet television only minutes before Bush landed, Prime Minister Valentin S. Pavlov also implicitly called for a new East-West economic deal by blaming the stagnation of Soviet industry on Western technology embargoes commonly known as “Cocom restrictions.”

Yeltsin, invited by Gorbachev, along with Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, to a noontime negotiating session with Bush in the Kremlin today, as well as a luncheon afterward, will have complete freedom to speak on issues of U.S.-Soviet affairs, Ignatenko said.

“All comrades taking part in the negotiations have the opportunity to discuss freely any subject--that is, full-fledged participation,” the Soviet spokesman told a news briefing. “That’s why our outstanding statesmen have been invited.”

Already the most popular politician in the country, Yeltsin last week reached general agreement with Gorbachev on a new Union Treaty that awards an as-yet murky role to Russia and the other constituent Soviet republics in the formulation of foreign policy.

The presence of Yeltsin and his counterpart from Kazakhstan--the most important of the heads of the five Central Asian republics--is a vivid gesture by Gorbachev that shows he is ready, as agreed, to share responsibility in what traditionally was one of the most jealously guarded preserves of Kremlin officialdom.

Bush, who met with Yeltsin at the White House this summer, will also be received by the Russian president at his Kremlin office today for talks. For Yeltsin’s entourage, the willingness of such an avowed Gorbachev ally as Bush to spend so much time with their boss amounts to recognition of a key power shift in this country’s political life.

“There is no single center of power in the Soviet Union,” Irina Timofeyeva, a press aide in the Russian government, commented on the upcoming Bush-Yeltsin talks. “He (Bush) may miscalculate if he neglects such a factor as the republican leaderships now.”

However, U.S. officials say they are only adjusting to changing political realities. They reject suggestions that, by meeting with Yeltsin, Bush will be slighting Gorbachev, with whom he is scheduled to hold a two-hour tete-a-tete today and at least six hours of talks at a country retreat outside Moscow on Wednesday.

Bush also travels Thursday to the Ukraine, the country’s second most populous republic after Russia, to meet the local leader, Leonid Kravchuk, and address the Parliament in Kiev.

“We don’t see it as an either-or choice,” a senior Bush Administration official replied when asked if the President isn’t “walking a tightrope” by dealing simultaneously with local leaders and Gorbachev.

Yeltsin, meanwhile, continued to steer his own course by meeting Monday with Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis, arguably the Soviet republic leader who is most distasteful to Gorbachev, for the conclusion of a treaty laying down the basis for relations between Russia and the would-be independent Baltic state.

Although the signature Wednesday of the strategic arms reduction treaty slashing superpower nuclear arsenals is the centerpiece of the two-day summit, Soviet officials have been hoping out loud that the meeting will bring the payoff for their concessions in the diplomatic and military arenas that, among other things, brought about the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe and spawned disarmament success stories such as START.

The U.S.-Soviet summit should provide a “follow-up to G-7,” Ignatenko said. He was referring to the meeting in London this month involving the leaders of the major industrial democracies and Gorbachev that resulted in the crafting of a Western program of assistance to the Soviet Union.

In talks with the Americans, the Soviet side will push for progress on at least three fronts: the lifting of the “Cocom restrictions” on the exports of militarily sensitive technology, the granting by the United States of most-favored nation trading status to the Soviet Union, and cooperation in converting military plants to civilian use.

“As the Cold War has receded into the past, trade and economic matters move to the fore in relations between the Soviet Union and the United States,” the official Tass news agency said in an obvious reflection of high-level government thinking.

It called the current level of two-way trade between the superpowers, an estimated $5 billion annually, quite insufficient given the fact that the countries in question have the world’s two largest economies.

That volume of trade could triple, Tass said, if U.S. trading restrictions on Soviet-made goods, including supposedly “Draconian tariffs,” are lifted.