Kremlin Doctors Deny Yeltsin Heart Trouble

Kremlin officials and doctors denied Thursday that Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, hospitalized Wednesday, is suffering from a recurrence of the heart trouble that kept him away from work for eight months until early this year.

“Medics find no other problems with the Russian president’s health except an acute viral infection,” Yeltsin spokesman Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky said from the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, rejecting a Washington Post report that suggested Yeltsin’s heart might be the real cause of his hospitalization.

Russian television stations showed Yeltsin--looking tired but not visibly ill--at the Barvikha sanatorium outside Moscow, meeting officials, signing documents and moving about freely.

Yeltsin, 66, who has a long history of hard work and hard drinking, underwent quintuple bypass heart surgery in November 1996 after being absent from work since July of that year. While he convalesced, he caught double pneumonia. He returned to work in February this year. In his absence, the government was rudderless and the economy drifted.

Although Yeltsin’s aides were reluctant to tell the whole truth about his illnesses throughout those eight months, and were prodded into disclosure of his heart problems only by the more frank Russian and American doctors who treated him, both surgeons Thursday dismissed rumors that Yeltsin’s current illness is heart-related.

“I am not alarmed in the least by the head of state’s general health,” Russian surgeon Renat Akchurin said. He told Interfax news agency that Yeltsin’s cold and respiratory infection were “absolutely not connected” with the operation he performed on the president last year.

U.S. cardiologist Michael DeBakey, who presided over Yeltsin’s operation and has been in regular contact with the Kremlin, confirmed: “He does not have a heart condition. What he has is an upper respiratory infection.”

Aides said Wednesday that the president will be hospitalized for 10 to 12 days.

That Yeltsin had been taken to Barvikha sanatorium, which does not have equipment or personnel to deal with heart illness, was a sign nothing is seriously wrong, DeBakey added. Yeltsin recuperated at Barvikha in 1996 but was operated on in a Moscow hospital packed with high-tech equipment.

“I am predicting now he is going to recover from this fully,” DeBakey said from his office in Houston.

To back up the point, Russian news agencies bombarded the public with information about Yeltsin’s activities Thursday. The president, they said, signed one decree streamlining state finances, another cutting the number of officials allowed to fly special government planes to six and made a third decision not to extend Col.-Gen. Pyotr Deinekin’s term after the air force commander reaches retirement age Sunday.

Still, financial markets that view Yeltsin as the sole guarantor of Russia’s economic stability and continued market reform posted their worst losses in a month, rattled not only by his absence from the Kremlin but also by declines in other emerging markets worldwide. The stock market fell 7% Thursday after a 4% fall the day before.

“We were in the process of restoring calm to the market,” said Nancy Herring, who manages the Lexington Troika-Dialog Russia Fund. Yeltsin’s illness “is an unfortunate event that reopens a lot of nervousness and concern.”