REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Yeltsin Huffs and Puffs, Blows Away Expectations

Boris N. Yeltsin can be accused of many things, but never of being dull. On a trip to China that he cut unexpectedly short Saturday, the Russian president demonstrated fully how unpredictable one outspoken world leader can be.

Take Yeltsin’s visit to the Great Wall of China. Before the president’s arrival, Chinese and Russian security officers showed four points of possible access to the president, one on each of four platform-like stopping places along a stretch of the wall a few hundred yards long.

The wall’s surface, about the width of a one-lane road, slants and slopes moderately along the mountainous terrain it tops until the rise to the fourth platform. There, it turns into a virtual “ski slope” that seems to stand almost perpendicular to the ground--or at least at about a 60-degree angle, forcing climbers to lean forward as they trudge strenuously upward.

No way, expectant officials and camera operators said, would Yeltsin climb that. He might play tennis, but he is older, his heart is known to be bad and he had been rumored to be ill during the recent meeting in Moscow of the Congress of People’s Deputies.

Only one Russian Foreign Ministry official really knew her president.

“He’ll do it, just on principle,” she predicted.

And so he did--huffing and puffing but never giving up until he conquered the hill.

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Yeltsin’s surprise announcement Friday that a historic treaty cutting American and Russian strategic weapons by two-thirds would be signed in early January caught everyone off guard, from American arms control officials to some of his own spokesmen. But it was only the most striking element in a speech that would have been the nightmare of any public relations manager.

Speaking to several dozen Chinese intellectuals in what would normally have been a low-key moment on his program, Yeltsin simply junked almost all of the text that had been prepared for him and handed out in advance.

Instead of sticking to dry phrases, he went off on his own tangents.

When Yeltsin was talking about prospects for joint Chinese-Russian factories, he commented that China appeared to have no rye bread--or at least, he had seen none in the preceding two days.

“Let’s set up a rye bread factory together,” he said, “and you can supply it to your general secretary (of the Communist Party, Jiang Zemin), who loves it so much.”

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If some of Yeltsin’s surprises could be cleverly calculated, others have every appearance of being totally off-the-cuff.

On Saturday morning, he was expected to leave Beijing about 8 a.m. for the southern city of Shenzhen to check out the prosperity of China’s special economic zones. It was only about 7:30 a.m. that his Chinese hosts suddenly announced that the trip was canceled and that he would fly directly back to Moscow.

The usual speculation followed. Was he sick? Had there been a falling-out with the Chinese? Had there been a coup in Moscow?

Yeltsin explained at the airport that he had received word overnight about serious wrangling in Moscow over posts in Russia’s Cabinet. But whatever communication he had at night, he did not appear to have informed his Chinese hosts until he woke up in the morning.

“Even we didn’t know about this,” a normally closemouthed Chinese Foreign Ministry official said in dismay.

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With a bit of breathing space on long flights from Moscow, Russian officials and reporters had a chance to analyze Yeltsin’s latest domestic surprises: his sudden call Dec. 10 for a referendum to let voters choose between his presidency and the Parliament and then his equally sudden pullback from both the referendum idea and his stubborn support for reformist Acting Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar.

One presidential aide said the referendum call, a rash move that threatened to set Russians against each other, possibly to the point of violence, was “pure Burbulis.”

Gennady E. Burbulis has long been considered Yeltsin’s closest adviser and the “gray cardinal” who comes up with some of the president’s boldest tactics. His great influence over Yeltsin and seeming arrogance had made the former Marxism teacher almost universally hated in the government, with enemies ranging from lawmakers to the vice president.

As part of a compromise with the Congress of People’s Deputies, Yeltsin agreed last week to fire Burbulis, and he has so far not received any new government post.

So with Burbulis gone, will Yeltsin become more predictable?

Not likely, the aide said. With Burbulis gone, it now seems the president’s closest adviser is Viktor Ilyushin, an extremely smart member of Yeltsin’s clique of old buddies from the city of Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinburg) who can be expected to push for slower economic reforms and more political discipline--with consequences that remain to be seen.

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The ultimate and most dangerous surprise, of course, would be some kind of a repeat of the hard-line coup attempt of August, 1991.

In a late-night chat in Beijing, a Russian analyst noted that a chic speculative theory circulating in Moscow now draws parallels between Yeltsin’s current political position and that in mid-1991 of then-Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Gorbachev’s vice president did not share his commitment to reform; current Russian Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi has repeatedly taken Yeltsin publicly to task for shortcomings in his program.

Gorbachev’s foreign minister had recently resigned, warning of a coup; Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev has issued similar warnings and is likely either to resign or be forced out by hard-liners soon.

Gorbachev’s prime minister was palpably more conservative than the president; the new Russian prime minister, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, is the same.

Gorbachev was trying to keep the Soviet Union together, and Yeltsin has to worry about cracks in the Russian Federation.

And the most obvious similarity: a populace hit by declining living standards and foundering as the old system continues to collapse.

What could trigger a coup, the analyst speculated, would be if Yeltsin decided to impose order by declaring emergency rule or dissolving the Congress.

But Yeltsin will probably not take such a dangerous step, the analyst said. That is, he said, for what any predictions about the Russian president’s next moves are worth.