Not So Bad on the Vision Thing : Yeltsin gives an impressive first speech at U.N.

“Not only the future of the people of Russia but also that of the entire planet largely depends on whether or not the reforms are successful,” Boris N. Yeltsin told the U.N. Security Council Friday.

The permanent seat on the Security Council once held by the Soviet Union now belongs to Russia. Yeltsin, in his first appearance at the United Nations, was speaking both of Russia’s prostration and of his own vision of a new world order.

By our lights, he did himself proud. He may lack the cool polish of a Francois Mitterand. He may lack the lyric warmth of a Vaclav Havel. No matter: Against the odds, Yeltsin, so far at least, keeps moving forward. He accepted President Bush’s latest arms-reduction proposals without missing a beat and trumped Bush with a proposal to turn the Strategic Defense Initiative into a less costly joint venture in anti-missile defense that apparently would remove the most objectionable feature of SDI: the hazardous launching and stationing of nuclear reactors in space.

And in his own way, Yeltsin isn’t bad on the vision thing. President Bush, in his State of the Union address, on the very eve of this nearly unprecedented gathering of heads of state, said: “The Cold War didn’t end--it was won. And I think of those who won it, in places like Korea and Vietnam.” In London on Thursday, Yeltsin countered: “I don’t think the United States has won the Cold War. I think we all have won it.” And he lengthened the honor roll, as the President so easily could have, to include the young Russians who died for democracy in the failed coup of last August. In this new era, he said, questions of human rights “are not an internal matter of states but rather their obligations under the U.N. Charter.” And Yeltsin would guarantee those rights by no-nonsense collective security arrangements. He greets the West not as a mere partner but as a willing ally.

But what of his rear guard? In the 1920s, imperial Germany became the Weimar Republic, was admitted to the League of Nations and signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, by which most of the major nations of the world forswore war. Alas, the bright promise of that decade died of hyperinflation, followed by depression, followed by the rise of Adolf Hitler.

All this could happen again. As Yeltsin spoke in New York, a major Russian economist, Grigory Yavlinsky, warned of hyperinflation in Moscow, even as a Russian general-turned-diplomat, Alexander V. Rutskoi, evoked the “glorious” Russian past and hinted at a revision of the borders.

Yeltsin meets with President Bush today at Camp David in Maryland. Emergency U.S. aid to Russia undoubtedly will be on the agenda. Next May, Portugal’s prime minister announced Friday, a conference in Lisbon will attempt to draft a “Marshall Plan” for the medium- and long-range transformation of the former Soviet republics.

Yes, we have problems of our own, but Yeltsin is right: At this historic moment, Russia’s problems are ours, whether we like it or not. We have won the war. Let us not now lose the peace.