Didn’t Sell Out, Yeltsin Says as He Flies Home

Embattled Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin declared victory at the U.S.-Russian summit Sunday, pocketing pledges of $1.6 billion in aid that he said will quickly improve his people’s lives and assuring Russians that he did not sell out the country in exchange.

“Cooperation is not concession-making but a vital necessity,” Yeltsin declared.

An hour after grappling with President Clinton in a farewell bear hug at the Vancouver Trade and Convention Center, Yeltsin was airborne, flying back home in his Ilyushin jet for what his entourage said will be a rally in the Siberian wilds.

That meeting today at Bratsk, site of one of the world’s largest dams, will mark the start in earnest of Yeltsin’s nationwide campaign for a show of confidence via a referendum now less than three weeks away.

When voting on the fate of their 62-year-old reformist leader, who has been sharply challenged of late by Communists and reactionaries, Russians should most favorably consider the results of the two-day Vancouver summit and the Clinton Administration aid efforts it produced for Russia, a top Yeltsin aide said.

“What is important is for Russian people, for ordinary Russians, including my wife, for instance, and daughter and others, to see that we are not alone in this world,” Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev said in a television appearance here Sunday morning.

Yeltsin himself embraced the U.S. Adminstration’s approach to supporting Russia, under which, Clinton noted, three-quarters of the money now being allotted would bypass Moscow’s governmental bureaucracy and go directly to Russians committed to free enterprise or truly in need.

“Let’s say we’re going to spend 300 billion rubles on health in Russia--that will reach every single Russian; 100 million rubles on medicine--that will reach every Russian,” Yeltsin chimed in at a joint news conference. “New technologies will generate new consumer goods for each and every Russian. Everything is people-oriented. This is Bill Clinton’s policy, it is Yeltsin’s policy.”

Despite such stirring rhetoric, it was obvious that the American money alone could do very little to kick-start Russia’s stalled bid to construct a free-market society in a country where the economy shrank last year by no less than one-fifth.

Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Vladimir P. Lukin, was even sarcastically dismissive of the new American program. He noted it includes $6 million for a pilot project to build 450 houses for former Soviet Army officers and retrain them for civilian life.

“Four hundred and fifty houses!” Lukin deadpanned in an interview. “That’s a whole village!”

Clinton said that the United States is prodding other members of the Group of Seven major industrial democracies to shoulder a much bigger burden in aiding Russia and that additional aid measures should be announced at the G-7 finance ministers’ meeting April 14-15 in Tokyo.

The U.S. aid was announced when it was still nighttime in Moscow, so there was no immediate comment from Yeltsin’s opponents or the galaxy of political parties that have sprung up since the demise of Communist rule. But Russians interviewed on the street Sunday evening varied in their assessment of how effective U.S. aid dollars could be.

“One billion dollars is a lot of money. An ordinary person here even cannot imagine such a mountain of money,” said Maria S. Bromberg, 46, a college teacher of mathematics. “But for a country like ours it is a drop in the sea. . . . We need a major change, a breakthrough. And only the Russian people can accomplish this, not Americans or Japanese.”

Denis Novikov, 24, a student at the Moscow Steel Engineering Institute, said: “Russia cannot be helped. The only thing to do is to declare Moscow the 51st state of America.”

Coverage of the summit by the broadcast media in Moscow on Sunday was low-key because opportunities for live reports were hindered by the 11-hour time difference between Vancouver and the Russian capital. Most Muscovites were already in bed by the time Yeltsin and Clinton held their closing news conference. Summit coverage led Moscow’s 10 p.m. news on Commonwealth television, but information was still scanty at that early hour, Vancouver time.

Because no newspapers come out in Russia on Sundays and few do so on Mondays, print reaction to the summit’s final results was delayed as well.

Yeltsin, under withering fire from Parliament Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov and other Russian conservatives for allegedly being a Western stooge, said he made no concessions to get the American money and had permitted no “linkage” of the aid to Russian policies.

He was especially careful to avoid implying that the assistance could be construed as a way for him to buy victory this month in the referendum.

“In regard to the referendum, that’s our internal domestic issue,” Yeltsin said. “It is up to us to persuade the citizens of the Russian Federation that if they do not vote in favor of confidence on the 25th of April, they will be dealing a major blow not only to Russia, but also to the United States of America, to the other countries of the world.

“This would be a loss to democracy, a loss to freedom, a rollback to the past, a return to the Communist yoke--something which is entirely inadmissible,” he said.

Although influential Westerners like former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger have said it is dangerous for the United States and its allies to stake so much on Yeltsin, the Russian leader said there is no one else at the moment able to lead Russia down the dangerous path of change.

“Today, I say, there is no alternative to Yeltsin. Perhaps there will be one tomorrow, but certainly not today,” Yeltsin said matter-of-factly.

Several times as he stood alongside Clinton fielding journalists’ questions, Yeltsin seemed to go out of his way to stress that he had been sticking up for Russian interests in his dealings with Moscow’s former Cold War adversary.

Despite American concerns, for instance, Russian troop withdrawals from Estonia and Latvia have been slowed because of discrimination against Russian minorities in those Baltic states, he said.

Yeltsin specifically objected to Cold War-era restrictions on Russia that are still in effect, including the Jackson-Vanik amendment linking most-favored-nation trading status to emigration practices and the so-called Cocom restrictions on high-technology exports.

“We said in fact that we were simply hurt that although Russia has embarked on the path of democracy, America is still treating us as though we were a Communist country,” Yeltsin said. “In fact, we are struggling against communism. I stated that quite clearly, and Bill Clinton agreed.”

The Russians, creators of the world’s first artificial satellite and manned space capsule, object that the United States and Western Europeans have all but shut them out of the commercial space market.

As a result of the Vancouver talks, Yeltsin said the two countries decided to alter their “approach” to the sale of Russian uranium--now halted by U.S. anti-dumping statutes--and to commerce in space and defense technology.

“We are prepared to compete, but to compete honestly,” Yeltsin said.

Times staff writer Carey Goldberg and Andrei Ostroukh of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.