NEWS ANALYSIS : In Trouble at Home, Yeltsin Does as U.S. Presidents Do : Diplomacy: The Russian flexes atrophied superpower muscles. He tries jump-starting the Mideast peace talks.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin is stealing a page from the modern U.S. President’s playbook: When facing domestic calamity, try foreign affairs.

Russia remains a great power that expects to play a key role in resolving international disputes, Yeltsin announced in his Feb. 24 State of the Nation speech to Parliament. His popularity sinking along with the dismal Russian economy and hard-liners nipping at his heels, the president and his men have set out to prove they mean business.

Showing that Russia intends to flex its atrophied superpower muscles not only in the former Yugoslav federation but also in the Middle East, Yeltsin last week sent his foreign minister to mediate between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization and try to jump-start the peace negotiations stalled by the Feb. 25 massacre of at least 30 Palestinians in a West Bank mosque.

Yeltsin also appointed a special envoy, diplomat Viktor Posuvalyuk, to handle Russia’s Middle East peacemaking activities.

The uninvited and unannounced diplomatic overture dismayed Israeli leaders, who had earlier told Igor Ivanov, the visiting Russian first deputy foreign minister, that Russian involvement was not welcome.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said he first heard that Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev intended to visit Tel Aviv on Friday from the radio.

“I don’t know why he’s coming,” Rabin said Thursday.

Rabin received Kozyrev politely but told him that Russian mediation could hurt the chances for direct negotiations between Israel and the PLO, Israeli diplomatic sources said.

Rabin, who was described as “very annoyed,” said he viewed Kozyrev’s appearance as “a sign of competition between the United States and Russia over the negotiations,” diplomatic sources said.

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres left Moscow more room to maneuver, saying, “We respect very much the role Russia is playing.” Peres distinguished between pro-Arab Soviet-era diplomacy and the new Russian initiative, which he called “really an attempt to contribute so the two parties come together.”

Saddled with $80 billion in foreign debt and once again seeking to delay its repayment schedule for 1994, Russia is in no position to reassert its Cold War-era influence on the Middle East by dishing out arms and aid to its old Arab allies.

As a public relations boost for Russian diplomacy, however, it certainly succeeded. In Tunis, Tunisia, on Friday, Kozyrev stood beside PLO leader Yasser Arafat and announced that the PLO was ready to resume negotiations with Israel on Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Kozyrev and U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher are expected to discuss conditions for revival of Israeli-PLO talks at a meeting Monday in the Russian port of Vladivostok, including the possibility of stationing foreign observers in the occupied territories to comply with Palestinian demands for security guarantees.

Preoccupied with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the ensuing domestic upheavals, Moscow effectively dropped out of the Middle East peace process after the initial Madrid conference in October, 1991, and has since allowed Washington to orchestrate negotiations.

Posuvalyuk, the new Yeltsin envoy, said Russia once again intends to play a significant role in peacemaking in the Middle East and in other conflicts.

“Russia occupies its own substantial niche in the Middle East, which no other country can claim, due to Russia’s historical and spiritual uniqueness,” Posuvalyuk told the newspaper Sevodnya.

Just as such new rhetoric about a special Russian role in managing its neighbors’ affairs has the White House worried, so the Russian press has begun to fret about Washington’s new cooler tone toward Moscow.

“Cooling Must Not Become Confrontation,” ran the headline in Saturday’s editions of the Red Star newspaper. The paper noted that America is stepping up its involvement with the former Soviet republics--notably Ukraine and Georgia, whose presidents visited the United States earlier this month--in an effort to balance Moscow’s influence.

The Izvestia newspaper wrote that U.S.-Russian relations are in “a most serious crisis” following the surge of nationalist and Communist forces in the December parliamentary elections and a subsequent harder line from the Kremlin.

“Washington cannot but be worried” by the “declaration of the former Soviet republics as a zone of Russian ‘special interest,’ the unwillingness to withdraw troops from Latvia and Estonia, and the decisive support for the Bosnian Serbs,” the article said.

Yeltsin took his defense of Russia’s prestige to an extreme Wednesday by furiously declaring he would not receive former U.S. President Richard Nixon after Nixon first met with Yeltsin’s political archenemies.

On Saturday, in a face-saving move, Yeltsin aides announced that while the president himself could not receive Nixon because of the recent death of his mother-in-law, whose funeral was held Saturday, the ban on any government official meeting Nixon would be rescinded.

Some of Yeltsin’s new bluster may be merely a bid to improve his poll ratings. His popularity plunged after he used tanks to suppress a revolt by Parliament leaders in October, and last week for the first time he slipped behind Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin in one widely watched survey.

Yeltsin faces a grim economic outlook, with unemployment rising, living standards continuing to slide and his policies under attack in a hostile Duma.

On Friday, a member of Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky’s ultranationalist party, Sergei Kalashnikov, told a news conference that some of Russia’s new poor could not even afford to buy 500 grams of bread a day--the ration that was given to the starving residents of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) during the World War II siege of that city.

And Russia’s military, whose support was crucial to Yeltsin’s survival in October, has launched a lobbying effort, saying it cannot survive proposed budget cuts.

Small wonder that Yeltsin, like many a U.S. President facing a hostile Congress and a sagging economy, is angling for a foreign policy triumph.

Yet Yeltsin could succeed abroad--and still wind up like former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev or former U.S. President George Bush.

“Excessive activity in the international arena--if it coincides with dramatic failures in the economy--causes irritation rather than understanding and support,” warned Andrei V. Kortunov of Moscow’s U.S.A.-Canada Institute.

“Success in foreign policy is not an answer.”