Miffed Yeltsin Scraps Talks With Nixon

A furious President Boris N. Yeltsin snubbed Richard Nixon on Wednesday, declaring he will not receive the former U.S. President now that Nixon has met with Yeltsin’s archenemies.

Yeltsin’s sudden outburst, the latest jolt to U.S.-Russian relations, apparently took not only 81-year-old Nixon but also Yeltsin’s own government by surprise. Yeltsin sent no private messages of warning or disapproval after Nixon met with former Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi on Monday and then with Communist Party leader Gennady A. Zyuganov on Tuesday, Nixon adviser Dmitri K. Simes said.

As late as Wednesday morning, Yeltsin’s chief of staff twice confirmed that a Yeltsin-Nixon meeting would take place, Simes said.

Yeltsin was apparently especially infuriated by Nixon’s meeting with Rutskoi, who was released from jail against Yeltsin’s will only 12 days ago. He had been charged with treason for leading last October’s violent parliamentary revolt.

“Former American President Nixon met Rutskoi and Zyuganov here, while the most interesting thing is that he had been coming here to meet me,” an angry Yeltsin said Wednesday afternoon. “Russia is still a great country, and you cannot just play with it like that.”

The Russian president also canceled meetings that had been scheduled for Nixon with Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and Chief of Staff Sergei A. Filatov and announced that no other government officials will see him. “ Nyet ! After this, no!” Yeltsin told reporters after laying a wreath on the Kremlin grave of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin.

In case Nixon failed to appreciate the insult, a security detail consisting of a car with three bodyguards that the Russian government had provided him was abruptly taken back, said Simes, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington who has arranged Nixon’s recent trips to Russia.

He added that the former President, who voluntarily gave up his U.S. Secret Service protection several years ago because he felt he did not need it, already had his own private guard service, arranged with a Russian company.

And late Wednesday, Yeltsin’s press service denied that the security detail had been removed, saying Nixon himself had said he did not require their services.

At a hastily called news conference, Simes said that both the U.S. and Russian governments had been told in advance that Nixon was on a private fact-finding mission, not an official state visit. Both sides knew that Nixon would meet with opposition figures, including ultranationalist lawmaker Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, who was shunned by President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore during their official visits to Moscow.

In Washington, Clinton said he had telephoned Nixon before the former President left on his 10-day visit to Russia. “And I said he should meet with whomever he wanted and I’d be interested to hear his reports when he got back,” Clinton said.

“President Yeltsin should not assume that Mr. Nixon is not friendly toward his administration and toward democracy and toward reform because, quite the contrary, he’s been a very strong supporter of our policy for the last year,” Clinton said.

Clinton suggested that Yeltsin should not “overreact” to Nixon’s meetings with opposition leaders and urged him to reconsider meeting with Nixon “because I think they’d enjoy talking to each other.”

Although the incident is probably not as serious as the recent tensions between the United States and Russia over policy toward the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina or over the Aldrich H. Ames espionage case, it once again demonstrates a new Russian determination not to tolerate what it considers demeaning treatment by the West.

“I don’t know whether it was a mistake or a deliberate attempt to insult Russia,” said Yeltsin spokesman Alexander B. Arfyonov. “If one comes on a visit, not to a banana republic but to Russia, one should thoroughly balance his actions and intentions.”

But as one of Yeltsin’s earliest, most ardent supporters, Nixon is an odd target for the 63-year-old Siberian’s ire. On a visit to Russia in April, 1991, Nixon met Yeltsin against Gorbachev’s wishes; Nixon later urged Washington to forge better ties with Gorbachev’s rivals.

It also was Nixon who persuaded the George Bush Administration to invite Yeltsin to the White House when the State Department had a dim view of the future Russian President, Simes said.