Yeltsin Exchanges Salutes With Soul Mate De Klerk : Diplomacy: The two leaders hail victories over communism in Russia and apartheid in South Africa.

In a measure of how much the world has changed, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and South African President Frederik W. de Klerk hailed one another in the Kremlin on Monday as political soul mates, Yeltsin for having overthrown communism and De Klerk apartheid.

Set against the decades-old patterns of international politics, De Klerk’s visit to Moscow--the first by a South African president--underscored not only the end of the Cold War, the two leaders noted after a day of talks, but also the triumph, however tentative, of democracy over totalitarian systems.

“Communism is dead--otherwise I would not have come to Russia, and I don’t believe they would have invited me,” De Klerk told a press conference. “And there is acceptance here in this big and important country of the irreversibility of the process of change in South Africa--we have turned our back on apartheid, and there will be no return.”

Yeltsin, intent on reversing what he regards as all the errors in Soviet foreign policy, was clearly anxious to improve relations, promising Russian support for South African efforts to resume its seat in the United Nations and other international bodies from which it has been excluded because of apartheid.

“The ideological barriers have tumbled, and we must move quickly to meet each other halfway,” Yeltsin told De Klerk.

Yeltsin said Russia sees in South Africa’s free-market economy many elements for its own development, and De Klerk praised Russia’s federal system as instructive in South Africa’s efforts to write a new constitution that will ensure the rights of all the country’s ethnic groups and diverse regions.

De Klerk, speaking at a Kremlin dinner in his honor, said the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe had “a profound effect” on southern Africa, where Moscow had supported several Marxist-Leninist governments and provided inspiration for the anti-apartheid movement within South Africa itself.

“These developments dramatically affected the course of history in southern Africa,” he said. “The whole region is moving away from the failures of the past toward the proven recipe of multi-party democracy and free enterprise.”

For years, Moscow had denounced the minority white governments of South Africa as the racist tools of imperialism. It supported the international anti-apartheid movement, spent millions of dollars financing the African National Congress and South African Communist Party and trained hundreds of black guerrillas.

“The evil of capitalism and of imperialism was evident in South Africa,” a Russian Foreign Ministry official commented last week. “The racism of the apartheid regime vindicated, it seemed to us, the whole socialist struggle.”

White South Africans saw a mirror image of that demon in a Soviet Union launched on an aggressive, international crusade to promote a world Marxist revolution. Already battling to retain power and privilege over the country’s black majority, whites saw the threat as real, imminent and directed at them, and they developed a “total strategy” to combat it.

“Things were rather more complex, and still are,” Rudolf F. Gruber of the privately financed South Africa Foundation said at a seminar on Russian-South African relations here last week. “But the point was, and still is, that the fundamental problems for both of us were at home, within the totalitarian systems that we had created. . . .

“As our societies throw off totalitarianism and undergo what must be very deep transformations, those problems fall away. Our problems were not so much with one another but within ourselves.”

De Klerk said that Marxists still exert a strong influence in many South African opposition groups, including the African National Congress.

“We’re still fighting communism in South Africa,” he said, “but we’re convinced we’ll win.”

South African officials are pleased that De Klerk’s visit, put off more than once, came before that of Nelson Mandela, president of the African National Congress, the principal anti-apartheid movement. Mandela had scheduled but then called off half a dozen trips to Moscow since his release from prison two years ago.

But De Klerk encouraged Mandela to visit Moscow.

“Mr. Mandela can see with his own eyes the consequences of such (Marxist economic) policies over a long period,” De Klerk said. “Perhaps then the ANC will revise even more than it has already . . . its policies and get in line with the rest of the world.”

Yeltsin was quoted by South African officials as telling De Klerk that Mandela, imprisoned for more than three decades, will be received as a human rights campaigner and opposition leader, not as the presumptive president of a majority rule government.

Beyond politics, the two countries said they will conclude a trade and aviation agreement shortly, and South Africa offered Russia $50 million in trade credits to help its transformation to a market economy.

South Africa and the Soviet Union shared close economic interests as the world’s largest gold and diamond producers even when they held no formal contacts. Informal and secret business ties survived political condemnations.