Yeltsin Runs Gantlet of Demonstrators : Visit: With taunts of ‘Murderer!’ echoing around him, the Russian president nonetheless presses the flesh during a stop in Montreal.

Demonstrators screaming slogans and waving placards confronted Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin here Saturday, but they couldn’t stop him from setting off on a wild press-the-flesh walk through the cobbled streets of Old Montreal.

In a rare contretemps that threatened to mar the last day of Yeltsin’s North American visit, about 300 Canadians of Serbian and Armenian origin rallied across the street from municipal government headquarters--the Hotel de Ville--while Yeltsin visited inside.

“Yeltsin betrayed the Serbs. He is a Russian, a Slav like us, and he betrayed us,” Yelka Acimovic, a Montreal resident in her 40s, exclaimed in anger at Russia’s decision to join the U.N. Security Council’s May 30 vote that imposed sanctions against Serbia.

Side by side at the curb with Acimovic and her group waving Serbian flags, a crowd of young Armenian-Canadians brandished signs accusing Yeltsin’s Russia of supplying weapons to Azerbaijan, Armenia’s enemy in the deadly battle for Nagorno-Karabakh.

Yeltsin emerged from the building to the jeers of protesters only about 30 feet away. The Cadillac limousine that was ferrying him from site to site was standing near the stairs, but Yeltsin shunned it and, sticking to his program, set off on foot for the cafes and eateries of the Place Jacques Cartier.

Sirens screaming, Yeltsin’s helmeted motorcycle escort did its best to follow, as did scores of scrambling demonstrators, who shouted “Serbia!” and “Murderer!”

For about 10 minutes, in what a Montreal police commander later said was “a nightmare, only worse,” Yeltsin charged down the sidewalk of the square, pumping hands of customers on the patios of cafes, with protesters and gawkers on his tail.

He scribbled his signature on a copy of his autobiography, “Against the Grain,” that someone held out to him, and on a magazine as well. Although it was a cool, overcast day, Yeltsin worked up a sweat and was cheered when he whipped off his suit jacket to appear in a white, short-sleeved shirt. The bodyguards and policemen protecting Yeltsin forced their way through journalists and bystanders, shoving photographers out of the way if they got too close.

To the relief of police, Yeltsin’s car picked him up after he reached an avenue running parallel with the St. Lawrence River and whisked him to his next destination, the Notre Dame Basilica, before his flight home to Moscow.

Much of Yeltsin’s one-day stop in Quebec’s largest city focused on the role French-Canadians can play in reviving Russia’s economy. Quebec and Russia have had government-to-government accords since 1986, and two-way trade already totaled $158 million two years ago. Yeltsin’s hosts want to extend cooperation in areas such as forest industries, fishing and agro-business because both northern lands have much in common.

In a luncheon speech to a group of local business leaders that was also attended by Quebec’s prime minister, Robert Bourassa, Yeltsin said his government was instituting a series of legal mechanisms that will give preferential treatment to foreign business as a way to spur outside investment.

Yeltsin also said, “We want to revive the practice of concessions to foreigners of different minerals and raw materials--wood, water, land and other items that present an interest to Russian and foreign entrepreneurs.”

He gave the business leaders no more details, but any large-scale concession system to foreign capital--for example, like the one during czarist times that allowed Europeans to run the Caspian Sea oil fields of Baku--would certainly aggravate nationalist opposition to Yeltsin.

After flying in from Ottawa, Yeltsin began his visit with a tour of the model dairy farm at MacDonald College at Ste.-Anne-de-Bellevue outside Montreal.

The 1,000-student school, the agricultural division of McGill University, has a computerized herd-management system that tracks the eating habits and milk productivity of fully two-thirds of the dairy cows in Quebec province.

Russia has nothing like it, Yeltsin ruefully admitted.