Pravda Prints Apology for Slap at Yeltsin

MOSCOW —  The nation’s Communist Party daily newspaper put an end Thursday to what has been called “the Yeltsin affair” by apologizing publicly to Boris N. Yeltsin for reprinting an article accusing the country’s leading populist of behaving like a drunken spendthrift on a trip to the United States.

The rare apology in Pravda, printed at the bottom of the international page, was a rebuff to the high-ranking conservative forces that are believed to have approved Pravda’s initial publication of the article from the center-left Italian newspaper La Repubblica. In the article, the Italian paper’s U.S. correspondent said Yeltsin found the United States “a holiday, a stage, a bar 5,000 kilometers long,” adding that he left a trail of “insane expenses” and “the perfume of Jack Daniels Black Label.”

The case provided a taste of earlier days of Kremlin-watching, when careful reading of the central press was the most reliable way to determine political victors and losers--a time before democratic-style elections and quarrelsome legislative sessions broadcast live on television.

It showed that Yeltsin--despite a remarkable political comeback--still has enemies in senior positions. But it also indicated that public support of him is so strong that such clumsy denunciations as the Pravda reprint simply anger many Soviet citizens.

“It’s a disgrace,” said 60-year-old Lidiya Pereverzeva as she stood reading a newspaper posted on a bulletin board near the city’s Pushkin Square.

“To think that our central newspaper picked up such nonsense from an Italian gossip rag,” she exclaimed. “In my opinion, Pravda should have apologized the very next day and not waited until today.”

Reporting was scant in the Soviet media on Yeltsin’s nine-day, 11-city tour of the United States this month, which included a meeting with President Bush. But comments attributed to Yeltsin raised some eyebrows here among senior officials who have access to foreign media reports.

Particularly noted was his lavish praise of the availability of products in America, his quip that he wasn’t sure if he would continue to be a Communist after his return to Moscow and his prediction that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had only six months to a year to make his reform program succeed.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov, speaking to journalists while Yeltsin was abroad, said the former Moscow party boss was not behaving as a patriot.

High-level concern about his outspokenness may have been behind the decision to reprint the La Repubblica article in Pravda.

Criticized Slow Pace

Yeltsin was stripped two years ago of his job as Moscow’s party leader after he criticized the slow pace of Gorbachev’s reform program. But his political career was dramatically revived, and he is today a hero to many Soviets for his bold criticism of the party system and of privileges traditionally awarded to top party and government officials.

The 58-year-old maverick was elected to the Congress of People’s Deputies by a landslide in March and is considered second only to Gorbachev in popularity nationwide.

The brief Pravda apology said its correspondent in the United States, acting on instructions from the editorial board, contacted La Repubblica correspondent Vittorio Zuccona to ask about the authenticity of his story.

Pravda discovered, the apology said, that Zuccona based his conclusions about Yeltsin’s behavior in the United States on secondary sources, including rumors from Soviet emigres.

“Pravda’s editorial board offers its apologies to Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin,” the newspaper wrote.

The La Repubblica article, reprinted in full in Pravda on Monday, accused Yeltsin of drinking heavily in the United States and squandering for personal purposes money collected as lecture fees that he had pledged to donate for the fight against AIDS.

Yeltsin angrily denied the allegations as “a simple lie,” but his response was not published in the Soviet press.

The decision to reprint the Italian article in full in Pravda--in itself a rare event--was approved and perhaps even suggested by a Politburo member, according to Soviet sources. In fact, approval at the Politburo or Central Committee level is common for virtually all political articles that appear in the official party newspaper.

The attack against Yeltsin created a stir in the capital.

“Somebody is interested in making Yeltsin dirty. But I don’t believe a word of it,” said 52-year-old Dmitri M. Sharapov, a radio engineer who was reading a newspaper in central Moscow during his lunch break Thursday.

Yeltsin’s supporters said they planned to demand the resignation of Viktor G. Afanasyev, who has been chief editor of Pravda since 1976, and warned that workers in some Moscow plants have already agreed to go on strike until the editor stepped down.

The reform-minded weekly newspaper Moscow News published an article Wednesday by its deputy editor, Vitaly Tretyakov, condemning Pravda.

“Pravda editors, having announced that the article was being published without any cuts, didn’t bother to print even one line informing the reader whether the author of the article was trustworthy,” Tretyakov wrote.

While the Pravda apology appeared to put an end to the allegations of excessive drinking and extravagant shopping, other questions about Yeltsin’s behavior in the United States remained unanswered.

Some Reservations

Even Tretyakov, a staunch Yeltsin supporter, said Yeltsin should consider responding to denunciations that he was too hasty in publicly criticizing his country while visiting another.

Tretyakov said he agrees with the correspondent of the government newspaper Izvestia, A. Shalnev, who said Yeltsin’s behavior made him recall former President Jimmy Carter’s visit to Moscow.

Shalnev said he asked Carter “about his attitude toward Washington’s Strategic Defense Initiative, knowing in advance that Carter was opposed to this system.”

“The ex-President looked at me and said: ‘I didn’t come to Moscow to criticize my government. I’ll do that in the United States.”’