Strauss, at Capitol, Pushes Hard for Russian Aid Bill : Legislation: But election-year politics leave envoy at an impasse. Democrats want concession on jobs bill.

Selling aid to Russia as if it were a domestic pork-barrel program, Ambassador Robert S. Strauss cut a swathe across Capitol Hill, pushing a balky House of Representatives toward a vote to approve President Bush’s proposal for billions of dollars in multinational loans to Moscow.

Despite a grueling schedule of congressional breakfasts, hearings and back-room arm-twisting sessions this week, the 74-year-old super lawyer-turned-diplomat found himself by Friday at an apparent impasse with the House’s Democratic leadership.

“Boris Yeltsin needs this bill now,” Strauss, the U.S. envoy to Moscow, pleaded with Democrats and Republicans alike.

But in an increasingly bitter election year, Strauss ran into obstacles on both sides. Conservative Republican congressmen object to the President’s bill because it includes $12 billion in new U.S. deposits at the International Monetary Fund, an institution they dislike.

And while most Democrats apparently are willing to vote for the bill, Majority Whip David E. Bonior (D-Mich.) said he will not send it to the House floor unless President Bush agrees to a Democratic amendment to a separate transportation bill providing $2.5 billion to create public works jobs in the United States.

“If the President would sign off on (the transportation bill), we could bring up the Russian aid package now,” Bonior said after meeting with Strauss.

“We are caught in a domestic political year,” Strauss sighed. He promised to explore the possibility of a compromise, but other officials said there has been no sign of White House willingness to endorse the Democrats’ expensive jobs measure.

“The votes are there, but it’s a question of timing,” Strauss said. “The chances of a vote before the election are only 50-50.”

But even a three-month delay, he said, would be a major blow to Yeltsin, who is under attack by critics for the economic hardships wrought by his reform plan.

“It would be very bad,” he said. “It would be a major setback.”

The Senate approved a version of the bill earlier this month.

Strauss tried to persuade House members that the $24-billion multinational aid package that Bush trumpeted in April will cost “only a couple of hundred million” in real taxpayer money.

“This is not a foreign aid bill,” he insisted. “There’s very little money in the . . . thing.”

He warned of “the jobs in America that are going to be lost if we don’t maintain our market position over there. The Germans are doing business over there, the French are doing business over there . . . the Japanese are coming in.”

And, to a congressman on the Agriculture Committee: “Your folks back in Kentucky will be glad to know that the Russians are great smokers, and they do like American tobacco.”

The Administration already has lost one of its favorite parts of the bill entirely: a bid to use Defense Department money to build apartments for Russian military officers.

The idea was to speed up the withdrawal of former Soviet troops from the now-independent Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

One reason the withdrawal has been slow, officials say, is that the troops and their officers have no place to live.

But congressional leaders decided that spending tax dollars to build apartments in Moscow would not look good in an election year.

“They have decorated officers living in huts you wouldn’t put your dog in,” said a Senate aide who visited Russia earlier this year.

“But we can’t be seen offering unemployment compensation to the Soviet military.”