At 2-Year Mark, Yeltsin Sees Parallels to Peter the Great

Boris N. Yeltsin appraised his first two years as Russia’s president Saturday, revealing moves to form a pro-Yeltsin political party and comparing himself to Peter the Great.

“It appeals to me that Peter the Great was a reformer,” Yeltsin said of the imperial Russian czar during a gathering of correspondents inside the Kremlin. “It appeals to me that he was not ashamed to learn from other states. It appeals to me that he was a resolute man.”

Yeltsin’s musings came as he assessed his own place in history, three years to the day that Russia’s legislature declared this erstwhile Soviet republic “sovereign” and two years after being elected his country’s first president.

Many observers now believe one of Yeltsin’s capital blunders as Russia’s leader was in not quickly forming an organized bloc of supporters in the Congress of People’s Deputies, a body that has become the bastion of his opponents. With three years left in his five-year term, Yeltsin, 62, said that the building of a party has begun.

“Believe me, very solid work is being done in this area,” he said. “Simply, it is not being advertised.”

Yeltsin again said he wants early elections to be held this October, give or take a month, to replace the current Congress, elected in 1990. Having a party to run a pro-Yeltsin slate will be vital.

Yeltsin is now backed by a loose pro-reform alliance named Democratic Choice, but many members of the Democratic Russia coalition that supported his presidential bid have deserted him.

But some of Yeltsin’s top allies and advisers--among them former Russian State Secretary Gennady E. Burbulis, former Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar and former Soviet reformer Alexander N. Yakovlev--are said to be busy forging a party.

In other remarks:

* Yeltsin said that President Clinton has proposed a one-on-one working breakfast July 10, the day after the close of a Tokyo summit meeting of the Group of Seven industrialized countries.

* Yeltsin also dashed Japanese hopes that the Tokyo meeting will produce a breakthrough on the two countries’ territorial dispute over four islands in the Kuril chain. When he meets Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa, Yeltsin said, “I will have nothing new to tell him.”

* He said the last three years have brought “decades” of change to Russia but have also been “the most intensive and action-packed period in my life.”

“The most pleasant surprise for me was that the people of Russia have learned quite fast, in terms of history, in terms of the standards of other countries, what the market is all about,” he said.

“Slightly more than 17 months have passed (since the lifting of most price controls and state subsidies), and today we have around 100,000 privatized and stock-issuing enterprises, about 300,000 individual farms.”

His worst surprise? “That there was no (economic) improvement in 1992, so let us hope simply for stabilization in 1993.”