Former Soviet States Are Slowly Reuniting : Alliances: Russia and 11 others advancing economic, military ties. Yeltsin is elected commonwealth chairman.

Three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the shattered heartland of the former superpower is slowly starting to glue itself back together.

In the last month, Russia has signed unprecedented agreements for military and economic integration with Kazakhstan and Belarus, and this week Moscow struck a deal on a long-delayed friendship treaty with Ukraine.

Re-integration was pushed onto the fast track Friday when the Commonwealth of Independent States--the union of 12 former Soviet republics that has so far existed mostly on paper--elected Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin as chairman, moved the CIS headquarters from Minsk, Belarus, to Moscow and put a senior Russian minister in charge of hammering out the devilish details of economic union.

At a summit in the Kazakh capital of Almaty, the CIS members also signed a collective security agreement and discussed setting up a joint air defense system managed by Moscow--important symbolic steps for struggling new nations that have jealously guarded their independence.

Yeltsin gave the other leaders a closed-door briefing on the situation in Chechnya, but Russia’s neighbors tactfully avoided public discussion of the secessionist region. Kazakh President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev said only that Russian leaders regretted the bloodshed and that “we should not allow such things to happen within the territory of the CIS.”

However, Nazarbayev said he considered Chechnya to be a Russian internal affair.

“It’s a huge victory for Yeltsin,” said Michael McFaul, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Despite all that’s happened in Chechnya . . . he’s managed to do this.”

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Although the CIS members agreed in principle to closer economic union last August, Friday’s summit marked the first time that practical military integration has been discussed, McFaul said.

CIS members rejected a Russian proposal for a joint army to protect the borders of the former Soviet Union--excluding the three Baltic nations, which are not CIS members.

The proposal to draw border troops from the 12 CIS nations and place them under Russian command was swiftly rejected by Ukraine, which saw the plan as an infringement of its sovereignty, and by Azerbaijan, which has lost 80 miles of its border in a war with Armenia.

The one-day summit did not all go smoothly for Yeltsin. The Russian president was visibly unsteady when he descended from his airplane in Almaty on Thursday, although he later attended a dinner with the 10 other presidents (Turkmenistan’s President Saparmurad A. Niyazov was absent).

On Friday, the white-haired Siberian had to be supported by aides on each arm as he walked from his limousine to the summit meeting room. And he failed to appear at a news conference with Nazarbayev, sending Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin instead.

The erratic performance rekindled speculation about Yeltsin’s health and drinking habits.

In his public remarks, however, Yeltsin was feisty.

He stated frankly that the performance of the CIS--which has signed about 400 agreements since its founding in 1991 but implemented almost none of them--had been “unsatisfactory.” But Yeltsin said a practical breakthrough can be achieved this year and told the leaders that “there is no alternative to the course of integration and consolidation of the Commonwealth.”

Moreover, Yeltsin reassured his allies, “Russia is not foisting anything on anybody. It respects the will and decisions of every CIS nation.”

Chernomyrdin and Nazarbayev spoke in glowing terms about the prospects for reviving the fractured post-Soviet economies through re-integration, elimination of disruptive customs and trade restrictions and legal reforms that would streamline business dealings.

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The Russian and Kazakh leaders praised the agreements signed in late January among Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus creating a customs union, abolishing tariffs and virtually throwing open the three nations’ borders. They invited the other CIS countries to join.

It is unclear whether Russia ultimately will manage to bring the far-flung and diverse CIS nations close into its economic and military orbit, as nationalists would like.

But a smaller and tighter economic union with Belarus, Kazakhstan and perhaps even Ukraine may be within its grasp.

Already, impoverished Belarus wants to give up its sinking national currency and rejoin the ruble zone--a proposal that Russia has so far rejected as too inflationary and costly.

Kazakhstan, a potential economic powerhouse, is keeping its own currency but has signed separate pacts to merge its army with Russia’s, exchanging some sovereignty in hopes of future riches.

Nazarbayev has also agreed to dual citizenship, a move he hopes will defuse tension among the heavily Russian population of northern Kazakhstan, where a movement to rejoin Russia has been gaining popularity.

Ukraine is officially nonaligned, with laws that prohibit joining any military union.

It forced Russia to withdraw a demand for dual citizenship and to give unqualified recognition of Ukraine’s existing borders as a condition of signing this week’s friendship treaty.

But Kiev has warmed to economic cooperation with Russia, indicating that it may be interested in customs union.

Even if the political hurdles are cleared, skeptics say the regulatory and legal reforms needed to integrate unstable and not-yet-capitalist economies could be nightmarish. Pointing to the long and painful history of the European Union, they warn that forming a meaningful economic post-Soviet union could take decades.

Special correspondents Mary Mycio in Kiev and Andrei Ostroukh in Almaty contributed to this report.