Yeltsin Pleads for Aid to Build Russia and Bury Communism : Diplomacy: The leader warns a joint session of Congress that the ‘70-year nightmare’ could return. He and Bush sign accords reinforcing a new partnership.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, with spellbinding oratory that drew thunderous applause from a joint session of Congress, declared Wednesday that he and his people have destroyed the “idol of communism” and are determined to build a new Russia.

But he warned that the “70-year nightmare” could return unless U.S. economic aid is forthcoming soon.

“Today I am telling you what I tell my fellow countrymen: I will not go back on the reforms,” Yeltsin said. “And it is practically impossible to topple Yeltsin in Russia. I am in good health, and I will not say ‘uncle’ before I make the reforms irreversible.”

Yet ultimate success hinges on returning Russia to economic prosperity, he said--with a boost from abroad, especially President Bush’s aid bill now stalled on Capitol Hill.

In the first such address ever by a Russian leader, Yeltsin poured scorn on the Communist philosophy, advocated partnership between the former superpower rivals and showed himself very possibly the superior of ex-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in his ability to deal with the West.

And he pushed forward with his effort to supplant Gorbachev in American eyes. Later, during a news conference with Bush, the strapping native of the Ural Mountains aimed a crippling blow to Gorbachev’s good name by charging that the architect of glasnost knew that U.S. POWs had been incarcerated in Russia but had kept silent.

On the diplomatic front, the two presidents joined in a White House ceremony to sign a “Washington Charter” laying the philosophical basis for new relations of partnership between Russia and America. They also signed the massive arms reduction agreement that they had concluded the previous day, which will cut each country’s arsenal by about two-thirds, as well as accords on space cooperation, on easing conditions for U.S. businesses to operate in Russia and strengthening existing pacts designed to prevent proliferation of nuclear and chemical weapons.

Each agreement in its own way reinforced what Bush called the “new partnership” between the erstwhile adversaries whose major foreign policy goal once was to counteract and stymie the other’s influence around the globe.

To highlight the quality of personal relations between Russian and American leaders, Bush and Yeltsin took a cruise of about an hour on the Severn River after lunch. Yeltsin later called it a “wonderful” trip. Bush said he and his guest mulled over “worldwide problems.”

Yeltsin came to Washington amid rising public discontent over his government’s “shock therapy” program to quickly build a market economy, and concerns at home and abroad that he was backsliding in that campaign. But Yeltsin’s emphatic affirmation of his commitment to reform seemed to reassure Congress.

Members of the House and Senate gave stormy applause to their guest’s commitment to speed Russia to a free market and to track down the fate of any American POWs who may have ended up in the former Soviet Union. They interrupted his speech at least a dozen times and surged to their feet seven times to clap.

There were even chants in the chamber of “Boris! Boris!”--sounds that must have been particularly sweet to Yeltsin, 61, who during the two-day summit was obviously bent on showing that he, and not his old political nemesis, Gorbachev, is the true Kremlin reformer.

Yeltsin had vowed not to come to America with his hand out, loudly seeking aid, and he didn’t. But for the world not to come to Russia’s assistance in its hour of need, he hinted darkly to Congress, could lead to the direst of consequences.

“For us, the ominous lesson of the past is relevant today as never before,” he said. “It was precisely in a devastated country with an economy in near-paralysis that Bolshevism succeeded in building a totalitarian regime, created a gigantic war machine and brought into being an insatiable military-industrial complex.”

The impact of Yeltsin’s eloquence on Capitol Hill, however, was uncertain. He told the news conference later that he thought the chances were “9 out of 10” that Russia would now get large-scale international aid. But some in the Democratic-led House were unswayed.

“Charity begins at home and then spreads abroad,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) said. “Who speaks for these cities? Who speaks for all of these unemployed persons across our land?”

Another House Democrat, John Murtha of Pennsylvania, also complained of a plethora of domestic problems, adding, “We can’t even get aid to Los Angeles through the Congress.”

“The people of Russia have to understand: It’s a little strange out there, and things work differently in an election year,” Bush told the press conference.

Dressed in a dark gray double-breasted suit and speaking to Congress from the microphone where House clerks usually read out bills under consideration, Yeltsin, in some gripping ad-libbing, moved to calm the political storm that he touched off Monday by saying that American POWs from the Vietnam War may still be in Russia.

“I promise you that each and every document in each and every archive will be examined in order to investigate the fate of every American unaccounted for,” Yeltsin said, departing from his prepared text.

“As president of Russia,” he continued, “I assure you that even if one American has been detained in my country and can still be found, I will find him. I will get him back to his family.”

The chamber sprang to its feet for yet another ovation.

Yeltsin paused, then looked Congress in the eye and wondered aloud why the lawmakers in the chamber had not yet passed Bush’s bill on aid to the Russian economy.

“Some of you who have just risen here to applaud me have also written in the press that until Yeltsin gets things done and gets all the job done, there should be no Freedom Support Act,” he said.

“Well, I don’t really quite understand you, ladies and gentlemen. This matter has already been investigated and is being investigated. Yeltsin has already opened the archives and is inviting you to join us in investigating the fate of each and every unaccounted-for American. So now you are telling me, first do the job and then we shall support you in passing that act? I don’t quite understand you.”

His performance won over at least one member of Congress who had maintained Tuesday that the issue of economic aid to Russia should be delayed until all the questions about POWs are resolved.

After the speech, at a luncheon given in the Russian president’s honor, Sen. John McCain, (R-Ariz.), himself a former Vietnam War POW, walked up to Yeltsin’s table and engaged him in intense conversation.

“I got his personal commitment that he would leave no stone unturned in looking for missing Americans,” McCain said. “I can’t ask for more than that.”

In remarks to reporters, Yeltsin said the names of the American captives had surfaced in the work being conducted by a commission looking into Americans who were imprisoned in the Soviet Union as long ago as World War I.

“Among the 22,554 names that the commission has so far investigated, there were names of American prisoners of war in Vietnam who the Vietnamese at that time transferred to the Soviet Union,” Yeltsin said.

At the news conference with Bush, he also said that the two countries would be delving into the downing of a Korean Airlines jumbo jet by a Soviet interceptor in 1983. The passenger jet, en route to Seoul from New York, had strayed off course over the Kamchatka Peninsula. Two hundred and sixty-nine people were killed.

In another sign of his sensitivity to U.S. domestic concerns and the collapse of Moscow’s global political ambitions, Yeltsin said that the Kremlin’s “infatuation” with Fidel Castro’s Cuba had ended with the demise of the Soviet Union and that even if trade continues, the lone Communist nation in the Western Hemisphere is no longer propped up by billions of dollars a year in subsidies from Moscow.

Yeltsin also ticked off a list of recent new laws and decrees that have liberalized Russia’s business climate for foreign investment and warned American business: “Don’t be late.”

He indirectly asked Congress to repeal legislation designed to restrict trade with the old Soviet Union, since “Russia is a different country today.” In an America whose economy remains stalled, increased trade would also create jobs, he said.

In a line that brought yelps of delight and applause from House and Senate Republicans, Yeltsin gave an oblique reelection endorsement to his American host. He noted that the disarmament agreement, cutting each side’s warheads to no more than 3,500, would not be implemented in full until the end of the century.

“I fervently hope that George Bush and I will be there in the year 2000 to preside over that,” Yeltsin said.

Yeltsin likened U.S. aid to Russia in its hour of need to the “second front” opened by the Allies in World War II, when the Soviet army was bearing the brunt of the fighting with the Nazis in the East.

YELTSIN’S AID PITCH: Russian leader makes progress; now it’s up to Bush. A8

Also on the Table . . .

During the two-day summit, Presidents Bush and Yeltsin discussed a number of issues beyond nuclear arms reductions and economic aid for Russia. They include:

RUSSIAN POWs--”Touched and excited” by Yeltsin’s revelations concerning the possibility that Vietnam War POWs might still be in Russia, Bush offered his good offices to secure the release of Soviet soldiers captured in Afghanistan and still held prisoner there, Yeltsin’s spokesman said.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS--Yeltsin informed Bush that as the Third Reich collapsed in World War II, the Nazis dumped drums containing highly toxic chemical weapons in the waters of the Baltic near Russia. The containers are wearing out, Yeltsin said, and unless a large-scale salvage operation is undertaken in the next year or two, he told Bush, an ecological catastrophe will result. The Russian leader prosed a joint Russian-American naval task force to recover the containers.

SPACE--The leaders considered future cooperation in space, including the launch of an American astronaut to the Russian space station Mir next year and the possible 1994 docking of a U.S. space shuttle with the same orbital platform. As a “more remote perspective,” they considered a possible joint flight to Mars, which Yeltsin said would help keep Russian scientists.

MILITARY--Presidents Bush and Yeltsin discussed the possibility of sending Russian military officers to the United States for training, much as Third World nations have done for years.

Source: Times staff