No Standing Ovations for Yeltsin Back Home : Reaction: Russians are proud of their president’s welcome in U.S. but say it won’t put food on the table.

Boris N. Yeltsin probably never looked more presidential than when he addressed the U.S. Congress this week, receiving one standing ovation after another from the American lawmakers.

But at home, the Russian president is drawing as many brickbats as compliments for his performance at the Washington summit and for the disarmament treaty and other agreements he signed.

“Yeltsin would never get such a rapturous response from the Russian Parliament,” said Sergei M. Plekhanov, deputy director of the U.S.A. and Canada Institute, a leading Moscow think tank, “and this he had better not forget. . . .

“Too many people hold Yeltsin responsible for what has gone wrong in their daily lives, and too many of our deputies are out to get him in any way they can. Washington was a stunning triumph for Yeltsin--here was a leader you could identify with--but he must still win in Moscow.”

A striking ambivalence ran through the comments of Muscovites on Thursday as they assessed the summit.

There was clear pride in Yeltsin’s welcome and gratitude for the further improvement in relations with the United States, but there was also cynicism about how much Western aid would get to them and suspicion that, to get this assistance, Yeltsin is accepting conditions that impair the country’s dignity and doing deals that may prove unwise.

“Yeltsin gets applause--fine,” said 37-year-old bus driver Pyotr I. Nosenko, “but does my family get any meat for dinner? I like that American saying, ‘Where’s the beef?’ ”

Lydia G. Smit, 52, a pharmacist, said: “My heart swelled with a great pride when I watched how Yeltsin was received as the president of democratic Russia--it was truly a wonderful moment. But--there were these little buts gnawing at me--what help will we get, and what will it cost us?”

Even the very warmth of the welcome Yeltsin received raised questions here.

“Eleven times they stood up and applauded,” Nikolai Y. Bartok, 45, a history teacher, said of Yeltsin’s address to Congress on Wednesday. “I could only ask myself, ‘Why--what has he given them?’ And then I asked: ‘What do we get out of this? Why aren’t we cheering too?’ I don’t have answers to those questions, not at all.”

Amid all the turbulence of Russian politics, Yeltsin’s Washington visit was being assessed first against the popular desire, practically unrealistic, for better days. But it was also analyzed by the president’s many critics for the smallest exploitable vulnerability.

Andrei S. Grachev, a leading political commentator and a onetime assistant to former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, observed that “these days, Russians tend to evaluate everything--good-bad, better-worse--in terms of their everyday lives, and nothing so far tells them Yeltsin’s policies pay off.”

The point, Grachev said, is that most of the agreements signed in Washington will have little discernible impact, except for massive injections of Western economic assistance that Yeltsin has asked for but is not assured of receiving.

“The reaction to the nuclear arms cutbacks, for example, is quite positive, for this is good, something we have sought for some years,” Grachev continued. “But in actual fact, nobody thought there was real risk of American attack, a nuclear crisis with the United States. . . . So, in the popular mind, the treaty is already discounted.”

Still, Yeltsin faces an important battle over the arms treaty, which conservatives want to make a test of political strength.

“National treason,” Richard Kosolapov, a Marxist philosopher and a leader of the new Russian Communist Workers Party, said of the new pact. “Yeltsin has no options but to make concessions that either border on or directly constitute treason, for which he will have to answer and answer soon.”

Alexei A. Prigarin, the leader of another group emerging from the remnants of the Communist Party, criticized the arms treaty as harming Russia’s security interests and accused the government of “obediently following” U.S. policies.

“The Communist Party welcomes an improvement of U.S.-Russian relations,” Prigarin said, “but the agreement on arms cuts needs careful analysis, for some military experts believe it contains certain conditions harming Russia’s interests.”

In Washington, Yeltsin committed Russia to destroying the country’s 308 SS-18 missiles, the heart of its nuclear arsenal, and some Russian foreign policy commentators see the agreement as unbalanced because the United States would preserve the major element of its strategic forces, its submarine fleet.

“However good are the intentions to destroy the nuclear legacy of the Cold War and to purge the planet of strategic missile stockpiles,” the newspaper Pravda said, “it is not clear why it is precisely Russia that must sacrifice its most powerful deterrent against any potential aggressor.”

And Nikolai Pavlov, an ultranationalist from the Unity faction in the Russian Parliament, said conservatives will do all they can to block the planned cuts in Moscow’s strategic arsenal, describing the agreement as so one-sided that it amounts to the country’s effective surrender to the West.

“I am not calling for violation of the constitution, but if the Parliament does not prevent Russia from coming under America’s ‘nuclear umbrella,’ clashes are inevitable,” Pavlov said, adding that “Russian Red Brigades” of guerrillas would emerge to fight the country’s current course.

But Yevgeny Ambartsumov, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Supreme Soviet, the country’s legislature, dismissed the conservative critics as blowhards and has-beens.

“They don’t have the popular support for such a stand, and they won’t have the votes when it comes before the Supreme Soviet,” Ambartsumov said. “Noise they will make, but they cannot win. Their opposition will prove to be an empty exercise.”

Nonetheless, Sergei Shakhrai, who resigned recently as Yeltsin’s legal adviser, warned that conservative hard-liners are growing in strength and that the president could face a coup as the opposition to his policies coalesces.

“The threat of a dictatorship comes from national-patriotic fascist organizations . . . from the injured psychology and national feelings of millions of Russians,” Shakhrai told the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.

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