How Much Aid Is OK? Yeltsin on Tightrope : Russia: He feels too much Western help--or too little--could jeopardize his chances of holding on to power.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, while banking on vastly increased American aid for his country, admitted Saturday that such Western assistance could jeopardize his chances of hanging on to power.

“Too much is not good and too little is not good either,” the Russian president declared after a first round of talks with the summit’s host, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney of Canada.

“Too little is bad because it would not enable us to solve our problems,” said Yeltsin, speaking to the press outside a red-roofed Mediterranean Colonial house that served as the venue for his talks here.

And, Yeltsin said, “Too much would be bad because the Communists would target us. The Communists would say we are shackled by the West.”

Yeltsin’s comments, made as he began his talks here with President Clinton, were a candid acknowledgment of the tightrope he must walk at the summit as a result of his precarious grip on power at home. He arrived here facing the possibility that an April 25 referendum asking citizens to pass judgment on his leadership could hurl him into political oblivion.

Yeltsin wants to leave the two-day Vancouver meeting without appearing to have to bend the knee to Clinton but with a public commitment for a quick, visible boost in American aid, which he hopes will convince Russians that the 16 months of economic and social pain they have been through since the demise of the Soviet Union are coming to a close.

In an effort to take that two-point message directly to the people, he will follow up on his visit to Vancouver by heading back across the Pacific to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula and the Siberian city of Bratsk, the head of his press service said.

At a private dinner Saturday night, White House Communications Director George Stephanopoulos said, Clinton spelled out for Yeltsin the details of a $1-billion direct bilateral aid program that focuses on aiding grass-roots reformers and individual Russians.

Yeltsin, declaring that he would rule a politically fractured Russia by telephone while abroad, left Moscow on Friday night. Before crossing the Pacific, his jetliner touched down for refueling in the frigid desolation of Magadan, site of many of the grimmest Siberian penal colonies during the Stalin years.

Yeltsin met with local officials, workers and a unit of border guards. He told the soldiers that Russia must press on along the difficult path from socialism to capitalism, despite today’s widespread disgruntlement, impoverishment and pain.

“Reform is like riding on a bike. If you stop, you might fall off,” Yeltsin said, according to the Russian news agency RIA.

After a hop across the Pacific, Yeltsin’s Ilyushin-62 jetliner rolled to a stop at 8:30 a.m.--right on time--at Vancouver airport in a steady rain. The 62-year-old Russian head of state emerged from his plane in a dark topcoat but hatless. In a gesture that brought cheers from the Canadians who gathered to welcome him, Yeltsin waved off an aide who offered him an umbrella.

It may have been simple macho Russian behavior, or Yeltsin may have been trying to counter talk rife in Moscow that he is a chronic drunk or physically unfit to rule. Such rumors were given a new boost by some slurring, halting speeches he delivered at sessions of the Congress of People’s Deputies last month.

The towering, silver-haired Siberian bussed Mulroney’s wife, Mila, on the cheek three times in the Russian manner. He stood ramrod stiff in the rain as a military band blared the Russian and Canadian anthems.

Yeltsin and Mulroney were then whisked off in a limousine for talks at the Norman MacKenzie House on the campus of the University of British Columbia, where the two men and Clinton later held a working luncheon.

Mulroney said the meal conversation focused on Yeltsin’s chances in the referendum and his intent to win a display of popular support that he can use to impose his will on the conservative-dominated legislature, which is largely hostile to his reform agenda.

“It’s going to be barnstorming all the way till the 25th of April,” Mulroney said, predicting an active campaign by Yeltsin.

On his Vancouver trip, the Russian leader was not accompanied by his wife, Naina Yeltsina. But his party did include two of his government’s top economic experts--Deputy Prime Ministers Alexander Shokhin and Boris Fyorodov--as part of an effort to make the Vancouver meeting appear to be as businesslike as possible, said Anatoly A. Krasikov, head of the Russian presidential press service.

Yeltsin’s mention of a possible backlash sparked by what might be perceived to be too much Western aid shows how delicate is the issue of aiding Russia’s embattled reformers. A rising chorus of conservatives, including Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, accuse Yeltsin of having sold out Russia to the West. Such criticism falls on fertile ground in a country where many feel humiliated by the loss of superpower status and the collapse of the economy.

As Yeltsin and Clinton began their first meeting in a small room at MacKenzie House, overlooking a breathtaking sweep of Howe Sound, Yeltsin showed he was keenly aware of nationalist sentiment back home when he was asked how much American assistance could help his government.

“It’s always useful to help a friend when a friend is in need. We are partners and we are friends,” Yeltsin said, carefully talking not of assistance but cooperation.

Seated in the other brown leather chair six feet away, Clinton interjected, “This is not a talk about aid. This is a talk about a long-term partnership. The United States has a great deal to gain from a strong, successful, democratic Russia.”

After the talks, Yeltsin pronounced himself “very satisfied.”

“Clinton has a unique psychology,” he told a Russian reporter. “Although we have a difference in age, we had good empathy, although maybe not in the first minutes.”

By the time the two men separated, Yeltsin said, he was calling Clinton ty , the familiar Russian form for “you.”

Despite such friendly feelings, Stephanopolous said that, during the talks, Yeltsin did not hesitate to raise the issue of remaining “irritants” in U.S.-Russian relations from Moscow’s point of view.

Yeltsin specifically objected to: Cold War-era restrictions on sale of Western technology still in effect; the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which still links most-favored nation trading status to unfettered emigration rights that Russia proclaimed long ago, and recent collisions between Russian and American submarines in international waters off Russia.

Stephanopoulos said Clinton expressed “regrets” over the incidents involving the subs, which Russian reactionaries see as proof that the U.S. military is still on a war footing against them while Washington insists that Moscow unilaterally disarm.

In Vancouver, Yeltsin did not mention the total sum of Western aid he that he considers “optimal.” But before leaving Moscow, he told journalists that West Germany had to lay out $100 billion--100 times the sum Clinton was expected to offer--to “kill the Communist monster” in East Germany. German officials, in fact, have estimated that the post-unification cost of rebuilding the eastern half of their nation may exceed $600 billion.

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