Bad Timing Doesn’t Slow Gore’s Russia Mission : Diplomacy: Despite Kremlin crises over past 18 months, vice president and premier make progress.

Al Gore has an uncanny sense of timing.

For the third time in 18 months, the U.S. vice president has come to Russia for a visit, only to find his host distracted by a domestic crisis.

In December, 1993, Gore learned upon landing in Moscow that ultranationalists and Communists had stunned the Russian leadership with a strong finish in parliamentary elections. A year later he turned up in the first week of Russia’s divisive war against separatists in Chechnya.

On Thursday, the vice president sat down again with his Russian equivalent, Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, a week after Chernomyrdin’s government had lost a parliamentary vote of confidence and two days before it was to face a second, decisive vote.

But then, after a four-hour delay so Chernomyrdin could attend an emergency session of Russia’s Security Council, the two men got down to business, as they always manage to do, convening a full panel of American and Russian specialists for talks on economic and technological cooperation.

Chernomyrdin thanked his guest for coming “at this difficult time.” Gore thanked his host “for demonstrating so clearly the importance of this commission . . . by assigning such a priority to it in the midst of one of the most challenging weeks your government has seen.”

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As crises come and go, the biannual Gore-Chernomyrdin meetings have become a steady anchor of the United States’ turbulent relationship with post-Soviet Russia.

Among other achievements, their commission has replaced the space race with cooperation, decided how to prevent Arctic pollution and channeled a modest but growing sum of U.S. investment into Russia’s fledgling market economy.

With Chernomyrdin’s power on the rise in Moscow, the commission is expanding and tackling a wider range of issues, including some that have frustrated Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris N. Yeltsin in their summits.

Clinton and Yeltsin set up the Gore-Chernomyrdin commission during their first summit in April, 1993, and assigned it to oversee cooperation in space, energy and high technology.

“Apparently both presidents hoped to concentrate on ‘big politics’ and leave routine economic issues to second-ranking executives,” Russia’s Kommersant Daily commented. “But it has become absolutely clear that Russian-American policy is inseparable from economics.”

In two meetings in Washington and three in Moscow, Gore and Chernomyrdin have grown close. They keep their translators busy with jokes. Between meetings they speak on the phone and ask about each other’s families.

Arriving in Moscow, Gore praised his counterpart’s “grace under pressure” in peacefully ending Russia’s hostage crisis two weeks ago and in trying to tame Parliament’s initial critical reaction.

“Friends have a right to be proud of friends,” Gore said.

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Equally important, the Gore-Chernomyrdin panel has grown into a permanent apparatus of sorts, working between meetings on its three initial briefs and five new ones--business investment, defense conversion, environment, health and agriculture.

Gore has five U.S. Cabinet officials in tow this week.

“The more we succeed in our commission, it seems, the more work we get,” Gore remarked Thursday.

Its toughest challenges in this two-day meeting are disagreements over Russia’s proposed sale of two nuclear reactors to Iran and a faltering 1992 deal for the United States to buy 550 tons of weapons-grade uranium from Russia’s nuclear stockpile.

Washington opposes the reactor sale, but Clinton failed to persuade Yeltsin at their summit here last month to cancel it.

Regardless of the outcome, Gore and Chernomyrdin will witness the signing of two major contracts by U.S. companies to invest in Russia’s Far East--the Exxon Corp. in oil and gas fields off Sakhalin Island and the Cypress Amax Minerals Co. of Denver in the gold and silver mines of Magadan.

Both ventures were underwritten by the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corp., along with $1.9 million in insurance to help Reader’s Digest launch its monthly magazine here.

OPIC this week announced $350 million in financing and political risk insurance for these and six other projects, bringing the value of U.S.-insured investment in Russia to $2.5 billion.

Gore said the commission will also announce a project by American and Russian doctors to fight diphtheria and tuberculosis and a joint business venture to convert a Russian plant that made propulsion systems for nuclear submarines into a producer of excavators for civilian construction.

By embracing Russia across such a spectrum of activities, the Clinton Administration had hoped to help consolidate political and economic reform. The result, though, has been less than expected.

Chernomyrdin, a stolid survivor of the Soviet bureaucracy, has pushed financial stabilization and privatization but lagged in restructuring the economy.

As American business executives complained to Gore here Thursday, corrupt Russian officials and confusion over tax laws still discourage investment. And the erratic Yeltsin has yielded increasingly to nationalist sentiment, distancing himself from the West on foreign policy.

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In Washington, the Republican-led Congress has reacted by moving to slash U.S. aid to Russia by nearly half--from $340 million this year to about $180 million. American officials said the U.S.-Russia panel is having to focus this week on which aid programs are most effective and which can be eliminated.

But the partnership looked alive and well Thursday as Gore and Chernomyrdin celebrated the success of an early project--the docking of the American space shuttle Atlantis at Russia’s Mir space station. The two men interrupted their meeting to watch a live, big-screen broadcast of the space linkup.

“This is a great metaphor for our work,” Gore said as he and the Russian prime minister laughed, applauded and shook hands. “It was very satisfying to work so hard on this at our first meeting and to now watch this milestone be set.”