Ailing Yeltsin Cancels Regional Gathering Again

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s latest illness--a severe sore throat and respiratory problems--led his staff Tuesday to cancel a summit of post-Soviet leaders of the Commonwealth of Independent States. It had been scheduled for Thursday.

But staff at the presidential press service insisted that Yeltsin will be back at work for next week’s big summit--a March 26 meeting with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Jacques Chirac in the central city of Yekaterinburg, where Yeltsin grew up.

“The president has been recommended by doctors to stay in bed as much as possible and not make public appearances this week,” spokeswoman Natalia Netreba said. “His schedule remains unchanged for next week, and the summit in Yekaterinburg is still on.”

Yeltsin was being treated with antibiotics, cough medicine and warm drinks, she added. His temperature was normal.

Yeltsin unexpectedly canceled all his engagements Friday as his second illness in four months set in. It came only three days after he insisted that doctors had given him a clean bill of health and that his long history of health problems was “a closed book.”

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The hard-working, hard-drinking president suffered his third heart attack during his 1996 campaign for reelection, and he has since had heart bypass surgery and a series of chest infections. At 67, he has lived nearly a decade longer than the average Russian man.

However, Russians have become increasingly used to Yeltsin’s long absences from the Kremlin--which add up to at least six months since his reelection in July 1996. Analysts say these absences no longer represent a danger to the country’s stability, as time has shown that the government continues to function when Yeltsin takes to his bed.

Meanwhile, Russian officials who deal with the moribund CIS--a loose organization of 12 ex-Soviet republics formed as the old superpower collapsed--were ordered to travel to other member states to work out a new date for their meeting. They may be relieved to have gained extra time: The gathering had looked likely to be an embarrassing washout for Russia.

As the republics of the former Soviet empire gain strength, the ineffective CIS has come to seem increasingly irrelevant. The summit being rescheduled had already been postponed once, in January, when Yeltsin had a chest infection. Earlier summits were repeatedly delayed.

Among other things, this summit was supposed to find an answer to the big question raised in Moldova in October at the last meeting of CIS leaders: Does the alliance have any reason to continue existing? The evening newspaper Izvestia mockingly called this “the Hamlet question: to be or not to be?”

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Said the newspaper: “The Commonwealth’s existence is up in the air. Everyone pays lip service to its existence, but everyone acts as though it wasn’t there. . . . It’s no secret that many Russian politicians think in old categories and stereotypes and treat the ex-republics of the Soviet Union with unhidden irritation, as if they were burdensome partners for Russia or satellites with no one to turn to except Russia.”

Several of the CIS presidents, busy at home and touchy about Moscow’s highhanded attitude toward them, have been dragging their feet about coming to meetings of an organization whose only practical role seems to be to give Moscow continued leverage over their internal affairs.

Kremlin officials are now suggesting that the summit might take place in late April.

But there are no doubts in Yekaterinburg that Yeltsin, Kohl and Chirac will turn up there next week. In preparation, 150 trucks and an army of unemployed people have spent the past few days clearing away heavy snow from the city center, government villas are being whitewashed, and locals are being drilled in how to hoist the flags of Germany, France and Russia. To the rage of workers who have gone unpaid for several months, the snow-clearing alone is costing more than $100,000 of the city’s scanty budget, the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta said.