Yeltsin Hails New ‘Era’ as He and Walesa Sign Pacts

Two giants of the anti-Communist struggle, Russia’s Boris N. Yeltsin and Poland’s Lech Walesa, signed a major trade pact and other accords Wednesday that Yeltsin said show the Kremlin has abandoned the bullying tactics of the past.

“There is no room for hegemony and diktat , the psychology of a ‘big brother’ and a ‘little brother,’ in new Russian-Polish relations,” Yeltsin told reporters in Warsaw.

“I can only say that if we fulfill half of what we have signed with President Yeltsin, our peoples will be very pleased with the results of cooperation,” Walesa told the news conference.

As a sign to Poles that Russia’s democratic leaders are truly different from their Soviet forebears, Yeltsin announced on his first official visit to Poland that the withdrawal of the last Russian troops on Polish soil will be complete by Oct. 1, three months earlier than planned.

The pullout of the 1,000-odd soldiers who remain will mark the first time since World War II that Polish territory is free of Russian military units, which watchfully kept the country firmly in the Moscow-led “socialist camp.”

“An entire era is coming to a close,” Yeltsin said, noting that Poland is even free to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as Walesa desires.

“The time when Polish leaders traveled to Moscow for advice, or, on the other hand, Moscow leaders went to Warsaw to give advice on what to do, is gone,” Yeltsin said.

The presidents signed more than a score of documents on bilateral trade and cooperation in energy, mining, engineering, pharmaceutical and consumer goods production, agriculture and scientific research.

The centerpiece of their economic agreements is an accord to build a large gas pipeline across Polish territory to allow the shipment of 67 billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas to European markets each year.

The pipeline, estimated to cost $3.7 billion, will be equally owned by Russia and Poland. It will help bolster Poland’s economic security by supplying the country with up to an additional 14 billion cubic meters of gas a year.

In a poignant moment that reminded onlookers of the many painful moments in Russian-Polish relations, Yeltsin became the first Russian leader to lay a wreath at a granite cross commemorating the murder of 14,700 Polish officers by the NKVD Soviet security police in 1940.

Until 1990, Moscow had blamed the execution-style slayings at Katyn forest on the Nazis. Relatives of the victims praised Yeltsin for the gesture of atonement in Warsaw’s Powazki military cemetery on Wednesday, but called on Russia to release all documents relating to the slaughter and to build a cemetery at Katyn, near Smolensk, for the victims.

Yeltsin is scheduled to leave Warsaw today for the Czech Republic and Slovakia.