NEWS ANALYSIS : Yeltsin Looks for Cure for ‘Gorbymania’

It wasn’t long ago that Mikhail S. Gorbachev came here, dined at the White House with President Bush, spoke as an esteemed guest to members of Congress and was hailed as a “hero of world peace” by House Speaker Thomas S. Foley.

Starting this week, the VIP welcome mat may no longer be out.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, who has just ended his visit to the United States, came in part to savage the good name of the man whom many Americans remember as the gravedigger of the Cold War but whom Yeltsin, beset by domestic opponents and overseas doubters, regards as a dangerous critic.

In remarks that Russia’s leader must have known would shock citizens of a nation where “Gorbymania” has remained strong, Yeltsin said Wednesday that Gorbachev, the Kremlin leader until December, was aware that U.S. prisoners of war, apparently as recently as the Vietnam era, had been held on Soviet soil.

Did Yeltsin mean Gorbachev and past Soviet leaders knew? one incredulous reporter asked.

“That’s just the point: They did know,” Yeltsin said.

It was a blow to the good name of Gorbachev, 61, whose glory in his more than six years as Soviet leader was his status as a man the West could “do business with.”

In the process, the Soviet president championed the policy of glasnost, or openness, at home and a “new way of thinking” in international affairs. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

So how could Gorbachev--avuncular and seemingly trustworthy--have known of the possibility that American POWs were on Soviet soil and done nothing?

“You have had a chance to ask a question of the former president of the former Soviet Union, why he kept this a secret,” was Yeltsin’s answer. ‘I am not responsible for him.”

That question was asked of Gorbachev on Thursday as he ended a five-day visit to Israel, and he flatly denied Yeltsin’s allegation, the Associated Press reported from Tel Aviv.

“I know nothing of the existence of such facts that Yeltsin was talking about,” Gorbachev said at a news conference at Ben-Gurion Airport. He suggested that Yeltsin’s statements were part of a smear campaign against him, the AP reported.

That answer may not put much of a dent in Yeltsin’s largely successful attempt this week to convince Americans that true democracy and reform in Russia began not in 1985 with the advent of Gorbachev but with Yeltsin, Russia’s president for only one year.

“The experience of past decades has taught us: Communism has no human face,” Yeltsin told Congress in what was a clear repudiation of Gorbachev’s failed efforts to return to the supposedly pristine ideals of Russian revolutionary V. I. Lenin.

One-upping the father of glasnost at his own game, Yeltsin also acknowledged, apparently for the first time, that the former Soviet Union’s “senseless military adventure” in Afghanistan cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians, not just the 13,000 Soviet soldiers whose deaths were revealed during Gorbachev’s administration.

Blaming the country’s woes on past rulers is a common Kremlin tactic, one that Gorbachev also used. For Yeltsin, prey to rising citizen dissatisfaction sparked by deteriorating economic circumstances, there is no real need to trash Gorbachev’s reputation at home, because the former leader is now regarded by most Russians as a failure or an outdated antique.

But abroad, especially in Western countries, things are different. It is an open secret in Moscow that the red-carpet welcome given to Gorbachev in Washington in mid-May, including a private dinner at the White House with Bush and an address to members of Congress in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall, irked Yeltsin no end.

The last straw seemed to be Gorbachev’s recent charge during an interview with a Moscow newspaper that Yeltsin and his team of young economic reformers had no grand strategy, were not true democrats and were leading Russia to ruin.

In the United States and other Western nations that plan $24 billion in aid to Russia, Gorbachev’s allegation set alarm bells ringing.

Not long after that outburst, Yeltsin took away Gorbachev’s limousine, and a Russian minister accused Gorbachev of having abetted terrorists when he was the Kremlin’s leader.

Bush had been one of the chief Western cheerleaders for Gorbachev, supporting him when it was clear to others that Gorbachev’s hold on both power and the country was doomed. So it must have been a gratifying moment for Yeltsin earlier this week when Bush welcomed him to the White House with an accolade he could never have given the last leader of the Soviet Union.

“You come here as an elected leader, elected by the people in free and fair elections,” Bush told Russia’s president. “And we salute you.”