NEWS ANALYSIS : Yeltsin Message: Send Aid or Face New Cold War

Boris N. Yeltsin, having brought down the Soviet system and ended socialism to the cheers of the United States and its allies, is now challenging the West to make sure that democracy and a free-market economy succeed in Russia.

Massive Western assistance is needed quickly, Yeltsin declared during his first trip abroad as president of an independent and post-Soviet Russia, or the reforms he has undertaken will likely fail, his people will grow discouraged and a new dictatorship will arise.

“We’re calling for cooperation, cooperation with the whole world, because if the reform in Russia goes under, that means there will be a Cold War again, and that Cold War could turn into a hot war with an arms race once more,” Yeltsin said here, spelling out the costs for the West if democracy fails in Russia.

“Again, there would be the same regime that we have just recently rid ourselves of. We cannot allow this to happen. In this reform, the whole world community must participate . . . not just with some sort of financial help but political support, cooperation and the accomplishment of the overall program.”

The challenge that Yeltsin is deliberately posing to President Bush and other Western leaders is one of responsibility if Russia’s transformation fails.

“Who lost Russia?” a senior Russian official accompanying Yeltsin said over the weekend. “That could very well be the question historians will put to President Bush if our reforms fail through lack of support.

“The basic task, of course, rests with us, but Bush and the West must play an essential role in supporting the change. That takes money, but more than just plain dollars it takes political courage and farsightedness.”

That message is not new. Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev delivered it frequently on his trips abroad, and only after the attempted coup d’etat by hard-line Communists in August did the West begin to understand how deadly serious Gorbachev had been.

“Had the West moved to support Gorbachev last spring, he would have been in a stronger position to put into place the economic reforms we needed and to resist the conservatives,” Vladimir Lukin, chairman of the Russian Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and the newly named ambassador to the United States, commented last week in New York. “This is a historical lesson for us all.”

Yeltsin, with his characteristic bluntness, made the point repeatedly and even more emphatically last week during his talks in Washington, London, Ottawa and at the United Nations in New York, for there is no higher goal now for Russian diplomacy than saving the country’s threatened reforms.

“Touch and go, everything is touch and go,” Yegor T. Gaidar, the country’s deputy prime minister for economic reforms, said in an interview in New York. “The next two or three months could be negatively decisive for us. . . . We need help, not to bail us out but to steady us on our course.

“Where do the West’s interests lie? Certainly not in a return to past oppression, certainly not in re-establishment of an ideologically aggressive political and economic system, certainly not in another battle for world supremacy. But still the West hesitates.”

The basic Russian argument is that Western security depends on the rapid and radical transformation of the old Soviet political and economic system into one based on a pluralist democracy, a strong free-market economy and peace among the former Soviet republics.

“Consider what happens if we fail,” Col. Gen. Dmitri Volkogonov, a Yeltsin adviser, commented. “Those who succeed us will not say that we weren’t radical enough, that we didn’t go fast enough. . . . To the contrary, to the contrary.

“If we fail, and we could, those who succeed us will say that the error was in abandoning socialism, in forcing out the Communist Party, and they will restore the Soviet system, perhaps in a reformed model but still very much a threat to the freedom of our people and everyone else in the world.”

Returning home Sunday, Yeltsin said he feels that the West is finally beginning to understand that the reforms in Moscow could be reversed and Western assistance is needed to underwrite the changes.

“I expect immediate results from my trip,” Yeltsin said on his arrival Sunday afternoon at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. “Especially now, I expect emergency food supplies. Everybody assured me that the food will be sent to Russia immediately. . . .

“This trip has finally prompted the leaders of a number of countries to support our reforms. At the moment, this support is strong.”

But Russian officials heard criticism from the ministers and their deputies who are their counterparts.

“They tell us we are going too slowly, that we are too timid, that we should do this or that,” a Yeltsin aide said at the end of the week. “They say we should demonstrate a greater commitment to democracy, that we should privatize faster, that we should open the economy totally to foreign capital.

“Again we are finding that the cheering section is very loud, very active but that the people who have the money are silent.”

Russia is seeking as much as $20 billion in assistance this year--about a third of it in humanitarian aid, a third to finance imports needed to get its industries going again and a third to stabilize the value of its currency.

The West so far has offered humanitarian assistance of a few billion dollars--a U.S. airlift of food and medicine is scheduled to begin next Monday--and less than that in loans to finance imports. Large-scale assistance has been left to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren in Moscow contributed to this story.