Clinton’s Summit With Yeltsin

* Aside from pre-election posturing, why are the Republicans jumping on President Clinton for his summit meeting in Moscow with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin?

It certainly is not that they really disagree with Yeltsin, who is following a classic Republican Party policy of privatization, deregulation, favoritism for the rich and heavy sacrifices and cutbacks for everyone else. What Yeltsin and Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich have in common is a commitment to capitalism without rules. Let the buyer beware. The environment doesn’t matter. Let the common person sink or swim, and let the rich and super-rich enjoy their growing riches while the rest suffer loss piled upon loss.

The Republicans’ professed discontent with the Russian summit has another source. Rather than being genuinely unhappy with Russia’s cowboy regime, Republicans hope that by posturing about its unruly behavior, they can argue that there is, even after the Cold War, still a need for a “strong defense” in the United States. Gingrich and his friends have always wanted the meat cleaver of budget cuts to fall upon everyone except our own bloated Pentagon Establishment. After all, a quarter-trillion-dollar annual military budget spells lots of Republican Party campaign contributions from happy defense contractors rolling in taxpayers’ money--from current generations and future ones as well.

LAWRENCE TEETER

Los Angeles

* Regarding “A Setback for Russian Extremists” by Larry T. Caldwell, Commentary, May 11:

Caldwell states that nations as well as people have to tell the truth to be free and to set the record straight. Let me remind the professor that there are quite a number of historical facts that the Russians in particular have never owned up to and that have conveniently been swept under the carpet by their own as well as by the U.S. media, such as:

Tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers held in Germany were branded cowards and traitors upon their return after 1945. They were sent to gulags and perished under the most brutal of circumstances.

Many millions of civilians were uprooted and driven from their ancestral homelands after the war, not only Germans (12 million) and Poles (1 million), but many other nationalities as well. The ecological damage done by the Soviet occupation forces in the former East Germany alone is colossal, with estimates for a cleanup to exceed $250 million.

The crimes of the Soviets were easily as staggering as any ever committed by a political or military power in history. Yet, their successors never fully owned up to the truth. Here are Clinton and Yeltsin toasting each other in Russia’s capital.

ROBERT MEYERHOF

Los Angeles

* Henry A. Kissinger bewails “Clinton’s missed opportunity in London” by writing (Commentary, May 12), “the cohesion of the Atlantic Alliance is not given anything like the priority the Administration attaches to placating Moscow.”

Clinton’s task was to put out fires, not placate anybody. The fire was in Moscow, not London. As a result of the meeting, Russia agreed to become a Partner for Peace. Clinton’s task now is to combine NATO, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and these “partners” into one organization to assure security cooperation and peace in Europe. Firemen are supposed to go where the fires are!

EDWARD C. PERRY II

Palm Springs