Yeltsin Sees ‘Certain Toughening’ by U.S. Under GOP : Russia: He tells nation’s top army officers that he must cultivate support among Republicans.

President Boris N. Yeltsin warned his top military officers on Monday to steel themselves for “a certain toughening” in U.S. foreign and military policy toward Russia in the wake of Republican midterm election gains.

In his first public reaction to the new conservative wave in American politics, Yeltsin also told a conference of Russian army officers he had realized that “it’s necessary to work out relations with the Republicans, to even out our relations with the U.S.”

Yeltsin enjoys a hearty friendship with President Clinton but has done little to cultivate support among the Republicans who will now dominate Congress.

He told the hundreds of officers attending the annual military planning meeting that he wants to avoid a mistake like the one the old Kremlin made when it ignored the Republicans during the Jimmy Carter presidency and paid the price when Ronald Reagan won the 1980 election.

“Then the victory of the Republicans and lack of contacts with them led to an acceleration of the arms race and aggravation of relations between the superpowers,” Yeltsin said, according to Russian reporters who were allowed to attend the conference. “This must not be permitted today.”

Russian analysts, who perceive Republicans as decidedly tougher toward Moscow, predict that U.S.-Russian relations will inevitably begin to worsen now.

“We should not exclude the emergence of some problems in Russian-American relations,” commented the respected Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper. “The Yeltsin-Clinton relationship may weaken significantly due to the pressure rendered on the presidents by both parliaments. Traditionally, the Republicans were cooler to Moscow than the Democrats.”

The newspaper questioned whether Clinton would be able to keep his promise, made during his summit meeting with Yeltsin in Washington in September, to have Congress lift barriers to Russian exports to the United States.

However, Georgy Arbatov, formerly the longtime head of the USA-Canada Institute, which is the main Russian think tank on America, said that “we should not feel fear, we should just feel some apprehension.”

“I don’t exclude the possibility that our relations will worsen,” he said. “The anti-American mood has become stronger in Russia compared to 1991. There is such a mood in our Parliament as well. Now, maybe the anti-Russian mood will be amplified in its American counterpart. Or maybe not. We’ll see.”

Yeltsin’s comments on the U.S. elections came in the course of a climactic annual meeting meant to provide an overview of the performance of Russia’s armed forces and their plans for the next year.

The Russian president’s concerns about relations with the United States followed his warning that although the threat of a superpower war has abated, Russia must still worry about the spread of nuclear weapons.

“A real possibility is arising that Third World countries will obtain nuclear missiles, and the probability that they will be used by these countries is growing,” he said.

He also praised the Russian army’s recent peacekeeping roles in war-torn former Soviet republics and its relatively orderly retreat from the Baltics and Germany over the last year.

But he did get into the most painful of points for servicemen--the diminishing budget allotments that lead to disasters such as September’s brief blackout at a nuclear missile command post that had failed to pay its electricity bills.

Yeltsin criticized top officers for reforming the army’s structure too slowly and for doing little to maintain “positive public opinion” about the armed forces, but Defense Minister Pavel Grachev’s position seemed to be safe for the moment, anyway. But the defense committee in the Duma, the lower house of Parliament, is slated on Thursday to consider whether to ask for Grachev’s resignation.