Next Step : Look Eastward, Russia: the New Asian Interest : Disappointed with the West and hungry for capital, Yeltsin courts Japan, China, India and South Korea.

The Romanov eagle had two heads, it is said, to look both east and west.

It was a fine symbol for Russia’s royal family, but the reality of Russian diplomacy and politics has been quite different. If most of its “body” is physically in Asia, the “head” of Russia has constantly been in Europe, where its history stretches back more than a thousand years.

And indeed, since taking charge here 10 months ago, President Boris N. Yeltsin and his advisers have had their eyes firmly fixed on Europe and the United States. For what is, ironically, Asia’s largest nation, relations with neighbors to the east have been little more than a casual concern.

Until now, that is.

For many reasons--commercial pressures, Moscow’s abiding dream to modernize Siberia, frustration in some circles with the West, military and security concerns--the Russians have begun paying attention to the world’s biggest, most populated, fastest-growing continent.

Despite the fiasco of his canceled visit to Japan last month, Yeltsin and his team show every sign of trying to launch an Asian initiative. Between now and January, the Russian leader is scheduled to visit China, India and South Korea. The trip to Seoul, originally postponed indefinitely along with the Japan visit, is now reset for Nov. 18-20.

Why the surge of interest?

“What the Russian leadership is now trying to do is mend the great imbalance in its international policy,” Yuri S. Peskov of the Moscow-based Far Eastern Institute said. “While we have well-established contacts with Europe and the U.S.A. and great shifts in that direction have been achieved, relations and ties with the countries of the Orient are still in the process of acquiring their proper shape.

“The greater part of Russia lies in Asia,” Peskov said. “That is why we must do our utmost not to allow a pro-Western slant in our diplomacy.”

Moscow’s immediate goals in Asia are to win a share of foreign markets and to give an economic jump-start to the nearly 80% of Russian territory--most of it an industrial backwater--that lies east of the Ural Mountains that divide Europe and Asia.

The question is: How to do it?

The think tanks and institutes that have input into the making of Russian foreign policy are divided into two major camps: One urges recognition that Japan is the No. 1 economic presence (and therefore, the most important country) in the region--the only one with pockets deep enough to provide capital and technology for pushing Siberia into the 21st Century.

Another camp urges priority for China, with which Russia shares a seat on the U.N. Security Council, nuclear-weapons capability, a 2,600-mile border and prosperous and growing two-way trade.

For the time being, no definite choice has been made. In fact, Russian experts and foreign diplomats acknowledge that Russia does not yet have a single, coherent policy toward Asia, probably because this debate is encrusted in more fundamental reflections about Russia itself. Should it strive to be Western, or does its role as a land bridge across two continents imply a Eurasian identity?

As Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev put it: “We have an unprecedented opportunity to be Asians in Asia and Europeans in Europe.”

Tilting Toward Tokyo

For the moment, “Japanologists” have the upper hand at the Foreign Ministry here. For the first time, the ministry’s top Asia hand is not a China-watcher, but a specialist on Japan: Georgy F. Kunadze, who speaks fluent Japanese.

Kozyrev himself has stressed that better ties with Tokyo are indispensable for a more prosperous Russian future. “If we don’t have normal contacts with Japan, you understand, that would mean not entering the Asian economic space,” he told a television interviewer. “The average Russian won’t see Japanese goods, Japanese joint ventures, Toyotas and a lot of other things.”

Tokyo’s critical role will be highlighted this week, when it hosts a meeting of 70 nations--including the United States--to review economic aid programs to Russia and the other former Soviet republics. News reports say Japan is especially interested in alleviating food and medical-supply problems in the Russian Far East.

Since the mid-1950s at least, forging friendly relations with Japan is a goal that has eluded the Russians. The cause and effect are what Konstantin O. Sarkisov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Japanese Studies, calls a diplomatic “closed circle.”

Japan wants Russia to relinquish four islands at the southern end of the Kuril chain that Moscow seized at the end of World War II before it agrees to a peace treaty and closer ties; Russia wants the treaty and better relations in general before the dispute is completely resolved.

Yeltsin’s inability to find an exit from this “closed circle” that would not enrage a large part of Russian opinion is what kept him from flying to Tokyo as scheduled in September.

“For the Japanese, getting these islands back has no economic or security significance--it’s a question of national pride,” Sarkisov said. “Just the way that keeping them is a question of national pride for Russia.”

History complicates the countries’ search for a new modus vivendi. Russia has been at war with Japan twice this century. The Japanese inflicted Russia’s most humiliating defeat in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. And Imperial Japanese soldiers occupied parts of Siberia after World War I.

Although both former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Yeltsin have gone out of their way to woo them, the Japanese seem quite unmoved. They do not need the Russians half as much as the Russians need them.

Japan was supposed to be the wealthy sugar daddy that, in exchange for access to Siberia’s trove of natural resources, would eagerly agree to construct railways, landing strips, ports, entire towns--in short, bring backward areas of Russia into the 20th Century.

But it hasn’t worked out that way, and the simmering dispute over the islands may mask the real reason: Japanese corporations are not interested in sinking trillions of yen into a country they regard as a currency-consuming “black hole.”

“There is almost no self-effort on the Russian side. They ask the foreign companies to build the infrastructure themselves,” said Shigeo Sugiyama, a professor of international relations at Japan’s Hosei University.

The China Option

The Russo-Japanese “closed circle” has led the other faction of Moscow experts to advocate the People’s Republic of China, already a trading partner of roughly the same importance as Japan, as the better country to court in Asia.

Vladimir S. Myasnikov, deputy director of the Far Eastern Institute, is one outspoken Sinophile in the policy debate. “China is a more ‘perspective’ partner both in the political and the economic aspects,” he wrote in a policy paper.

Simple economics, he says, is one reason.

Russian firms sell wood, cement, steel, chemicals and fertilizers to China; in return, Russia gets shoes, textiles, electric fans, jeans, silk shirts and thermos bottles.

In the chaos of the Soviet meltdown, commercial exchanges with China dropped by at least a half-billion dollars last year, to $3.9 billion, according to Russian diplomatic sources. But trade has rebounded fast, and the 1992 volume is expected to be higher, according to Chinese diplomatic sources. So far this year, Russian-Chinese trade has been running a half-billion dollars ahead of Russian-Japanese trade.

In December, at the invitation of President Yang Shangkun, Yeltsin will journey to Beijing, becoming the first leader from Moscow to call on the “great eastern neighbor” since the collapse of the Soviet Communist empire.

It will be intriguing to watch the reception he gets, since according to Reuters news agency, Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen has accused Yeltsin in a secret report of seeking to take Russia back to the time of the imperialist czars.

On the other hand, it seems the pragmatic Chinese now want to keep ideology from interfering in relations with onetime Soviet Russia and are keenly conscious of the importance of deepening economic relations between the countries.

Because he is not a Communist, Yeltsin may actually be easier for Beijing to stomach than was his predecessor; on his 1989 visit to China, Gorbachev was hailed by the same pro-democracy demonstrators who were ruthlessly crushed the next month.

China’s hard-line Marxist leaders made no secret of their contempt for Gorbachev’s doomed effort at building “humane, democratic socialism” and moved quickly to recognize the junta that tried to topple him in August, 1991.

The old Moscow-Beijing traffic in arms continues, but today it is on a strictly commercial basis, rather than aid offered one Communist comrade by another. Chinese Defense Minister Qin Jiwei was in Moscow last month, reportedly shopping for sophisticated electronics gear.

One downside to this trading relationship is that as long as Russian firms are able to sell their substandard machinery and manufactured wares to China, they have no compelling need to modernize.

“In 10 years, China won’t need to buy finished products from us anymore; it’s moving forward too fast,” Sarkisov said.

Also, while China may be valued as a source of cheap consumer goods, weapons orders and low-cost migrant labor, it cannot provide the technology or capital needed to develop Asian Russia.

Courting South Korea

Can South Korea fill the capital and technology gap left by Japan? Official relations were established with Seoul only two years ago in a transparent gambit to alert the Japanese that if they didn’t move faster, Korean entrepreneurs would pour in to fill the vacuum.

Yeltsin renewed such overtures this month by dramatically releasing secret Kremlin documents on one of the most loathsome acts in the history of the Soviet state: The 1983 downing of a South Korean commercial jet carrying 269 people.

Policy-makers in Moscow, however, soon had to admit that their faith in the might of the South Korean economy was inflated. “South Korea’s gross national product is just one-half of the GNP of the city of Tokyo,” Sarkisov noted.

That is not to say that the Koreans don’t have impressive technological wizardry and big visions. When Yeltsin arrives in Seoul on Nov. 18, the Russian press has reported, President Roh Tae Woo will propose a colossal two-country, multibillion-dollar project to exploit natural gas deposits on the continental shelf around Sakhalin.

India Loses Clout

Russia’s relations with India, meanwhile, have become decidedly less important in the Kremlin’s security calculations, now that ties with China are normalized and Moscow no longer has a client state to prop up against Muslim insurgents in Afghanistan.

Yeltsin, who has accepted an invitation from Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao to visit New Delhi next January, will try to revive some of the old passion in the relationship. A mostly symbolic treaty will be signed supplanting a 1971 Soviet-Indian pact of peace, friendship and cooperation.

“Inspired pragmatism is going to be the basic principle of future relations between Russia and India,” Russian State Secretary Gennady E. Burbulis announced during a visit to India last May.

Translation: The lavish Soviet-era expenditures of rubles to build munitions plants, steelworks and power plants in India will not be repeated.

In May, Russia and India signed an agreement to conduct future trade in dollars, replacing a complicated 30-year rupee trade arrangement.

And, Russia agreed to resume annual shipments of crude oil, kerosene and diesel fuel, worth about $650 million annually, that were halted in 1991.

Parallel to such government-to-government accords, private firms reportedly did half a billion dollars’ worth of barter deals and other creative contracts in the first six months of 1992. From loose tea to cotton pajamas, Indian goods find a ready market in Russia.

The Indians have also earned a reputation here as scrupulous payers of the bills they rack up for weaponry.

Daunting Task

Whether Yeltsin’s leadership can succeed in its ambitious goals--or even find much time to devote to Asia as Russia reels from crisis to crisis at home--is open to question.

Realizing perfectly who is buttering its bread (or perhaps more aptly, who is awarding it farm credits to purchase grain), Russia has turned its back on Asia for most of the time that Yeltsin has been supreme Kremlin leader.

“In the ‘march to the civilized world,’ as they put it here, the West is the only priority,” one Asian ambassador to Moscow scowled.

Still, becoming a vibrant economic presence in Asia is vital if Russia is to become prosperous and important again in the world at large, many insist. For that to happen, Yeltsin will have to succeed where both Gorbachev and Czar Nicholas II failed.

Russia’s Foreign Trade

Total imports-exports, January to August, 1992 (in U.S. dollars) Europe continues to outpace Asia in trade with Russia. Top Asian partners include China, at $2.4 billion, and Japan, at $1.9 billion.

Europe $29.5 billion

Asia: $9.2 billion

United States $2.2 billion SOURCES: Russian Ministry on External Economic Relations, Itar-Tass news agency

The Long March Eastward

Peasants fleeing tyrants, settlers hoping to strike it rich, military officers in search of glory and czars expanding their empire have all played roles in Russia’s expansion into Asia. The empire would eventually include a large portion of the Russian Republic and the republics of Uzbekistan, Kirghizia, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan of the former Soviet Union. Some key phases: THE PIONEERS: The first significant Asian incursions were led by groups of traders, farmers and peasants fleeing the wrath of Ivan the Terrible, the first of the Muscovite rulers to take the title of czar. They settled in western Siberia in the 1570s and 1580s, where serfdom had yet to be established. The pace of expansion remained slow and disorganized as periodic expeditions struck out in search of freedom and prosperity in the vast territories of the east.

REACHING TO PACIFIC: The first settlers reached the Pacific Ocean in 1639 under the rule of Michael Romanov, the first of the Romanov dynasty that would rule Russia until 1917. As expansion continued, possible conflicts with China were mitigated with the signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689.

SLOWED PACE: Although Peter the Great established one of his first administrative provinces in Siberia in 1710, only 200,000 Russian settlers had moved east of the Ural Mountains and into Asia by that time. But conquests in Central Asia gave the czars control of a vast area of striking geographical and human diversity, acquired at relatively little effort.

RENEWED INTEREST: After being defeated by the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War in 1856, Russia renewed its interests in Asia. It won disputed territories from China and defeated rebel tribes in the Caucasus by 1864. Central Asia was consolidated in a series of military campaigns between 1865 and 1876.

CONFLICT WITH JAPAN: Russia’s successes in Asia prompted Japan to attack Russian ships at Port Arthur, a Chinese port being leased by the Russians, in 1904. The attack sparked the Russo-Japanese War, which Japan won.

END OF EXPANSION: With the outbreak of World War I, the ensuing domestic upheaval and the 1917 Revolution that ended czarist rule and led to the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922, Russian expansion in Asia came to an end. With the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, contraction began, as the Central Asian republics declared independence and became separate nations.

--Compiled by Times researcher Kevin Fox

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica, World Book Encyclopedia