Stumping Yeltsin Turns Up in Chechnya

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin made a surprise pilgrimage to war-torn Chechnya on Tuesday, meeting with his troops and speaking encouraging words to local residents after 17 months of vicious fighting.

The trip followed by a day the signing of a peace agreement by top Russian and Chechen officials at a Kremlin negotiating session presided over by Yeltsin, who is fighting a tough reelection battle.

“The war is over. You have crushed the rebels,” Yeltsin told a group of camouflage-clad Russian troops, some wearing flak jackets and helmets, huddled around him in the Chechen village of Pravoberezhnoye.

Following what has become a tradition of passing out favors during his campaign stops, Yeltsin used an armored vehicle as a desk and signed a decree discharging conscripts who have served at least six months in hot spots--such as Chechnya--half a year before their two-year terms are finished.

Later in the day, addressing troops amassed at an airport in Grozny, the Chechen capital, Yeltsin adopted the confessional tone that has flavored much of his reelection campaign.

“I am not shaking the blame off myself” for the political miscalculations and mistakes that have made peace so elusive in Chechnya, he told them.

“The Chechen crisis is Russia’s most acute wound,” he added.

The war, which has killed as many as 30,000 people, mostly civilians, has been a major obstacle in Yeltsin’s reelection bid. Through his participation in the peace talks and his trip to the region, Yeltsin was hoping to boost his chances in the mid-June election, and many political analysts believe he has.

“This is a beautifully orchestrated and timed campaign move,” said Yuri A. Levada, a respected pollster who directs the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion. “Once again, the president demonstrated that he is a courageous fighter.”

Yeltsin had been talking about traveling to Chechnya to negotiate with the local military leaders before he announced that peace talks would be held Monday in Moscow. It was not clear then if he still intended to take the risky trip.

“This is vintage Boris Yeltsin,” Levada said. “Everybody had been expecting him to go to Chechnya for a couple of weeks already, yet when he does go, it comes as a surprise.”

The war in Chechnya, a mostly Muslim republic in southern Russia, started in December 1994, when Yeltsin sent 40,000 Russian troops to the region to quell an independence movement. But despite the immense investment of troops and machinery, he proved unable to quash that movement or end the hugely unpopular war.

On Saturday, Russian troops captured what they called the last rebel stronghold, Bamut, a former Soviet missile base.

Although Yeltsin’s trip to Chechnya was unannounced, Russian media reported the event extensively.

The president first stopped in Pravoberezhnoye, where he talked with local residents and Russian Interior Ministry troops, and then flew by helicopter to Grozny, where he addressed a motorized rifle brigade and an auditorium of local civic leaders and citizens.

The troops in Grozny greeted him with a brass-band salute, and Yeltsin in turn heaped praise on them.

“You defended your homeland, its sovereignty,” he said, according to reports in Russian news services. “You did not allow them to break up the Russian state.”

Yeltsin conceded that the fighting may not be completely over, despite the Kremlin-brokered truce scheduled to take effect Saturday. He said Interior Ministry troops will be called on to “destroy” any gangs unwilling to surrender.

“All of Chechnya, all of Russia, wants the Chechen knot to be untied as soon as possible,” he said.

Chechnya was quiet while Yeltsin was there, according to Russian public television.

Yeltsin’s security service kept the Chechen separatist leader, Zelimkhan A. Yanderbiyev, in Moscow for continued talks while Yeltsin left for Chechnya without rebel leaders’ knowledge, reported the Russian news service Itar-Tass.

“It was a very smart move on the part of Yeltsin to keep Chechen separatist leaders as de facto hostages in Moscow while he made his fast trip to Chechnya,” said Lechi Umkayev, a Chechen political leader. “Of course, it was a campaign measure, and a very successful one too. But as to the peace settlement in Chechnya, I am not very optimistic about its prospects.”

Supporters of Yeltsin’s main rival for the presidency, Gennady A. Zyuganov, accused the president of political opportunism and predicted that the truce will not hold after the election.