NEWS ANALYSIS : Yeltsin Can Now Sell Russia With a Straight Face : Summit: The Kremlin leader’s meeting with Clinton will be their fifth. But this time, he arrives knowing he has restored some stability at home.

Watch Boris Yeltsin’s barrel chest as the Russian leader meets President Clinton for their fifth summit Tuesday. If it is thrust especially proudly, if his labored imitation of an American smile is especially wide, if his performance in the now-familiar Bill-and-Boris Show looks more relaxed than ever, there will be reason.

For the first time in his three years as president of Russia, Yeltsin can face his American counterpart buoyed by the best kind of success at home: not just his slaying of the Communist dragon, not the bitter victory that came of turning tanks on his own Parliament last October, but the most Herculean achievement of all--taking Russia from turmoil to stability.

“We can see now that Yeltsin is in full control,” Sergei Chugayev, political commentator for the Izvestia newspaper, wrote last week.

“Full control” is going a bit far. After all, Russia is still being bled by gangsters and corrupt bureaucrats, and the best that can be said of its economy is that the long slump appears to have bottomed out.

Still, as this summit rolls around, Yeltsin comes to Washington able to sell American investors on Russia with a straight face. Russian officials have even begun to boast of an imminent investment boom.

“The era of aid is over,” said Alexander Livshitz, Yeltsin’s top economic adviser. Russia no longer needs handouts, he said, now that it can offer “what it couldn’t in past years--I mean political stability and a half-year of moderate inflation.”

The Clinton-Yeltsin summit agenda includes talks on Bosnia-Herzegovina, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and global peacekeeping.

Yeltsin will warm up to those themes in a speech to the U.N. General Assembly today, spelling out Russia’s evolving post-Cold War foreign policy.

But his prime objective this trip is to court American capitalists. He will meet this morning with business leaders in New York, and for the first time, four captains of American industry have been invited to join part of a summit in the Oval Office.

Accompanying Yeltsin are dozens of hopeful suitors for American capital, from the head of the beleaguered ZIL auto maker to the creators of the world’s largest cargo plane.

After he meets with Clinton on Tuesday and Wednesday, Yeltsin will spend his summit “free day” in Seattle, where he will bestow his presence on Boeing Co., which has been actively developing ventures in Russia.

Yeltsin’s pitch to American business includes: inflation chopped from double digits to 5% or so per month; a crop of privatized factories willing to sell large chunks of themselves to foreign owners, and new or planned decrees offering tax breaks and investment guarantees.

And just in case stability doesn’t work as a sales pitch, Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev reverted last week to an old scare tactic. He reminded readers of the Kommersant Daily newspaper that if Russia’s economic development is stymied, the government could be taken over by extremists--and “after that, we could simply forget any discussion about partnership with the West.”

Economics aside, the long-touted Russian-American partnership in politics is likely to be tested gently this week as the two countries work out their post-Cold War strategies.

The Americans, for example, hope to air their deep concerns about Russia’s control of its nuclear arsenal--from its highly publicized leaks of black-market plutonium to its inability to meet treaty schedules for destroying its missiles.

On Sunday, Sen. Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Russian control over nuclear weapons remains “the most important challenge we have in national security for the next 10 or 12 years.”

The two presidents are expected to sign a technical agreement that will include unprecedented U.S.-Russian exchanges of information on the nuclear materials they have in their stockpiles.

U.S. officials say they will also push plans for a $75-million nuclear warehouse and a $30-million computerized system to track Russian nuclear stockpiles.

Nuclear smuggling, however, is a ticklish issue for the Russians; many in Moscow suspect that the United States is blowing the danger out of proportion to gain access to Moscow’s nuclear secrets and direct control of its arsenal.

But there appears to be little controversy over the proposed agreement, and Clinton’s reported plan to offer more American money for Russian missile-dismantling is sure to go over well with the needy Kremlin.

No new arms control initiatives are expected. Both countries say they are content for now to coordinate unilateral moves without nailing them down with treaties, as they did in January when they stopped aiming their missiles at each other.

If any discussion is likely to grow heated, it could be the talks on Bosnia. Yeltsin, like his French and British counterparts, opposes Clinton’s plan to seek a lifting of the arms embargo against the Bosnian Muslims if Bosnian Serbs do not accept an international peace plan by Oct. 15.

The two presidents could also find the going rocky as they discuss their countries’ overall missions in the world.

Moscow is seeking recognition that it retains a “sphere of influence” in most of the former Soviet empire, where it wants to be the policeman-of-record and enjoy some latitude in protecting the 25 million Russians who ended up living “abroad” when the Soviet Union collapsed.

U.S. officials say they do not recognize such a Russian “sphere of influence.” In turn, they assert that Moscow must accept an inevitable eastward expansion of NATO to embrace Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as full members.

Yeltsin, with a wave of born-again ultranationalists at his back, cannot give in easily to the spread of the Kremlin’s old adversary.

But overall, the trust and friendship that have grown between the new Russia and the United States are looking solid enough that even such clashes come with a clink and not a crash.

Clinton and Yeltsin have become such comfortable buddies that Yeltsin will even stay in Blair House, the official U.S. guest house, rather than at the Russian Embassy--a first for a Kremlin leader.

Andrei Kortunov, a top Russian foreign policy analyst who helped prepare Yeltsin’s U.N. address, may have summed up the feel-good, easygoing atmosphere of this summit best when he allowed his description of foreign policy differences to drift off into open boredom.

Yeltsin wants to show, he said, that “Russia will have its own foreign and defense policy independent of the West and . . . but at the same time that does not necessarily mean that Russia is turning its back on the West and, you know, blah, blah, blah. . . .”

The Russian media have written almost nothing on this upcoming summit--in contrast to the pre-Yeltsin era, when the meeting would have dominated every front page and broadcast for a week.

“There is a giant positive change behind this indifference,” a commentary in Izvestia said recently. “The summits no longer decide matters of peace and war, life and death.”

Goldberg reported from Washington and Boudreaux from Moscow. Times staff writer Doyle McManus also contributed to this report.