Gunman Rakes U.S. Embassy in Moscow

In a dramatic instance of the anti-American sentiment sweeping Russia because of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, a man fired a submachine gun Sunday at the U.S. Embassy here, raking its walls with bullets.

The yolk-colored exterior of the embassy, now spattered in many bright hues, is showing the effects of four days of protests--probably the most heated ever seen there--by demonstrators who have hurled paint, rocks, beer and eggs, burned American flags, broken windows and urinated.

On Sunday at 1:40 p.m., the gunman, wearing camouflage and a black ski mask, leaped from a four-wheel-drive vehicle and tried to fire a grenade launcher at the embassy but failed. According to witnesses, he then pulled another grenade launcher from the car and tried unsuccessfully to fire that too.

Television footage showed him jump back into the vehicle, and seconds later, a hail of automatic gunfire sprayed from the car window while police fled and protesters threw themselves to the ground.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman said Sunday that the protests at the embassy were “the most intense in anyone’s memory.” In 1995, a grenade was fired at the embassy, causing limited damage in an attack believed to be connected with NATO strikes on Bosnian Serb positions in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

If Russians’ views of America were idealized, even naive, in the 1980s era of perestroika under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and in the years after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, there is now a marked hardening of opinion. But whether the present outrage over U.S. actions against Yugoslavia marks a sea change in attitudes toward America or just a temporary disillusionment with U.S. policy is a question that is likely to depend on how long the North Atlantic Treaty Organization continues to bomb Yugoslavia and on whether Russia gets loans it desperately needs from the International Monetary Fund.

The wave of sentiment against American and NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, of which Serbia is the dominant republic, is not confined to the angry nationalist and Communist demonstrators who have gone to the U.S. Embassy. On a warm spring afternoon in Moscow’s Pushkin Square, young Muscovites who grew up on a diet of American pop culture were expressing the same indignation and outrage Saturday.

Law students Pavel Zaznobkin and Maria Maximova are fans of American music and films. The pair had just come from eating at McDonald’s. Both expressed shock at the NATO air campaign over Yugoslavia, whose predominantly Orthodox Christian people are seen by many Russians as Slavic brothers, and both said the airstrikes have changed their attitudes about the U.S.

“They [Americans] are interfering in business which is not theirs. It’s an internal conflict. What right do they have to drop bombs on peaceful civilians?” Maximova said.

“If this campaign by the U.S. continues, people will start to think of Americans as enemies. It’s happening already,” Zaznobkin said.

Across the square, three men in their 20s, clad in leather and jeans, chose harsher words, speaking loudly and interrupting one another to get their points across. Two claimed they were prepared to fight on the Serbian side.

“I never considered America our enemy. As soon as they started bombing Yugoslavia, they became my enemies, and I would volunteer to go and fight,” said Sergei Yermolayev, 26, a businessman.

“The Americans should be given hell,” said his friend Alexander Lazarev, 24, a welder. “They’re arrogant--they think they’re the world’s policemen. America thinks Russia has fallen so low compared with the U.S.S.R. in terms of military might that they can dictate conditions anywhere. But our patience may run out, and that would lead to World War III.”

Peter Ekman, who teaches fine arts at the American Institute of Business and Economics, said the anti-American sentiment in Moscow at present is rational opposition to the bombing.

“One thing I’d hate to see happening here is people saying that Russians hate us and it’s the beginning of a new Cold War,” he said.

The one example of anti-American sentiment Ekman had seen personally, he said, was a “Yankee Go Home” notice stuck on the faculty notice board at the institute.

He said that for many years, Russians “looked at America in somewhat of a naive way, as being the savior of Russia. I think they’re a little disappointed now, but I don’t see any emergence of a view of America as a Great Satan.”

In a sign of the breadth of feeling here, condemnation of NATO’s actions has also come from some prominent pro-market advocates.

“If America behaves like an elephant in a china shop in Europe and other parts of the world, then anti-American sentiment will not only dominate Russia but other countries as well,” said Boris Y. Nemtsov, a former first deputy prime minister.