Removal Seen as Setback for U.S. Diplomacy

The Bush Administration watched Sunday night with increasing concern the reports from Moscow that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has been replaced.

“All we know is what we have seen” on Cable News Network, a State Department official said late Sunday, shortly after the television network and news agencies carried the ominous report that Vice President Gennady I. Yanayev had taken over for Gorbachev.

U.S. officials said they did not know yet whether Gorbachev is ill or has been deposed in some sort of palace coup. In either case, the development is a severe setback for U.S. diplomacy.

The State Department official said the U.S. government had received no explanation from Moscow, where the announcement was made in the predawn hours.

The reports reached the summer White House in Kennebunkport, Me., at about midnight in a telephone call from National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. The President, who is spending a month at his family’s seafront retreat, was informed of the development, but it was not clear whether he was awakened for the call or had not yet retired for the night.

“All we’ve seen are the press reports. We’re checking into it,” said Doug Davidson, a presidential spokesman.

One White House official said the U.S. Embassy in Moscow was pressing for additional information.

Officials in Kennebunkport reacted with skepticism to the initial suggestions from Moscow that Gorbachev had been in ill health, saying that as far as they knew, the Soviet leader had been well and on vacation in the Crimea.

To the idea that Gorbachev had been ill, one official said, “I hadn’t heard anything like that before.”

Gorbachev had appeared to be in excellent health when he met President Bush late last month in Moscow. Four days after the Bush-Gorbachev summit was completed, the Soviet president left the capital for his annual monthlong vacation in the Crimea.

Gorbachev had planned to interrupt his vacation to return to Moscow today to prepare for the signing of a new Union Treaty, the culmination of four months of effort to hold the Soviet Union together.

Despite growing indications that Gorbachev was in increasingly severe political difficulties at home, the Bush Administration considered him to be the nearly indispensable figure in post-Cold War detente.

Although the Administration made a few gestures at reaching out to emerging figures in the Soviet Union such as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and leaders of other republics, Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III have said repeatedly that the most important U.S.-Soviet relationship was with Gorbachev and the central government.

The word that Gorbachev had been replaced came as most top U.S. officials were out of Washington on their own vacations. Bush is at his home in Maine, and Baker is at his vacation home in Wyoming.