Russia Left to Guess About Yeltsin Surgery

The conspiracy lovers’ version holds that Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s heart surgery has been delayed since September because what he really needs is a transplant and the search is on for a donor.

The pragmatists’ assumption is that the bypass operation will be Thursday, the start of a three-day holiday during which Russian financial markets will be closed and invulnerable to the nail-biting that will follow the operation.

The cynics’ expectation is that Yeltsin will go under the knife today, so that even this most closely watched heart operation in history would be overshadowed by the U.S. presidential election.

And the truly paranoid believe the surgery will never happen because the Kremlin leader died weeks ago or because he would be susceptible to sabotage by underpaid health workers.

In the absence of reliable information about when and how the leader of this nuclear-armed country will be operated on, wild stories and speculation about his date with destiny are rife throughout Russia.

Knee-jerk secrecy has taken over in the Kremlin as final preparations for the operation are underway. Despite a decade having passed since former Kremlin leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev inaugurated glasnost, a policy of more openness with the people, no one in the know will discuss the president’s operation.

The Moscow Cardiological Center, where the surgery will take place, has been transformed into a fortress, with the single approach road barricaded by emergency vehicles and as many as 150 police officers deployed around the site.

Monday’s medical conference at which a date for the surgery was to have been decided took place under the most confidential conditions. An official statement carried by the Itar-Tass news agency said only that Yeltsin is “quite satisfactory” and that preparations “are practically drawing to a close.”

Presidential spokesman Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky told the Interfax news agency only that the operation could take place “within days.” The Echo of Moscow radio station claimed to have inside information from the cardiological center that the operation would be today.

When famed U.S. cardiologist Dr. Michael DeBakey arrived Sunday to lend his expertise to the consortium of doctors evaluating Yeltsin, he was whisked away by Kremlin security officials before he could make any statement.

Before he left Houston, DeBakey said he had been informed by Russian colleagues that the timing and other details of the operation were to be kept secret until after the president had pulled through.

The office of Dr. Renat Akchurin, the cardiologist trained by DeBakey who is expected to perform Yeltsin’s operation, left a number on his answering machine where he said he could be reached.

“This is the presidential information center,” a brusque official responded when asked for Akchurin or DeBakey. “Don’t call this number again!”

The order to put a lid of secrecy on the vital operation was reportedly given by Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, who has been acting as family liaison between her sanatorium-bound father and his administration in the Kremlin.

While the information blockade may have been intended to relieve public pressures on the Yeltsin family and the president’s surgeons, it has rekindled widespread suspicions among Russians that their leadership is incapable of providing the full truth.

That mistrust born of decades of Communist-era disinformation has been evident in the rumor mill kicking into overdrive.

“Everyone I’ve talked with at the Chazov center is convinced Yeltsin’s going to have a heart transplant,” said one Western source with professional connections to the Moscow Cardiological Center, which is run by Yevgeny I. Chazov, the surgeon who kept Soviet-era leaders alive.

The head of the rival Bakulev Cardiac Research Center, Mikhail M. Alshibaya, said Monday that he would have advised Yeltsin to go abroad for the operation.

“In the United States, people are more interested in keeping him alive than they are in this country,” the cardiologist said. “Even among nurses who will tend to Yeltsin, many of them might have Communist convictions, and this might have an unconscious influence on the outcome.”

Attempts by Yeltsin’s staff to cast the ailing president as still robust and in charge despite four months in seclusion have done nothing to alleviate concerns that the Russian public is getting a distorted picture.

An opinion poll by the Mneniye organization released over the weekend suggested that only 18% of respondents believe Yeltsin is really in charge. More than 56% said some other figure is running the country; 26% said they didn’t know.

“This is classic Kremlin behavior,” one attache from a Western embassy said Monday. “They’ll lie to everyone until it’s all over.”