Yeltsin Seeks Trade, Not Aid, Stresses Access to Markets : Summit: At talks in Tokyo, the Russian leader will push for an end to Cold War-era restrictions.

MOSCOW —  The locale is the worst Boris N. Yeltsin could have wished for. And the countries he has been counting on for help are either in economic doldrums or full-blown recession.

Is it any wonder, then, that Russia’s leader will not be going to the Tokyo summit with the Group of Seven with his hand conspicuously out?

“The most important thing that we would like to hear from G-7, and it will be the key theme, I think, of the statement of our president, is access to markets, an end to discrimination,” Deputy Prime Minister Boris G. Fyodorov said.

So look for a different kind of appeal from Yeltsin when he meets with the leaders of the richest Western countries in Japan’s capital. Trade, not aid, is what he is expected to emphasize, although Russians still count on plenty of the latter as well.

Moscow is already resigned to the fact that it cannot hope for anything like the $4 billion to finance privatization of state-owned industries that had been President Clinton’s original vision. But there has also been a high-level rethinking here of aid as a whole.

“The lesson now before everybody’s eyes is how heavily the Soviet Union got in debt,” said Mikhail Berger, economics correspondent for Izvestia. “The Russian leadership doesn’t want Russia to get heavily indebted in turn.”

Yeltsin’s first experience with the G-7 in Munich a year ago also was a lesson in caution. Then, leaders of the seven richest industrial democracies triumphantly announced “a genuine and comprehensive partnership” with Russia, complete with pledges of $24 billion in assistance. But billions of that never materialized.

“The romanticism in Russia’s expectations has gone,” said Yevgeny V. Sergeyev, an influential member of the Supreme Soviet’s Foreign Affairs Commission.

Egged on by the young, bespectacled Fyodorov, insiders say, Yeltsin will now seek better terms--lower interest rates and longer pay-back--on $11 billion in credits already offered by individual Western countries this year.

To keep Russia from falling even further into debt, Fyodorov now advocates spurning some of these “linked” credits, which are loans at relatively high interest rates that can only be spent to buy goods and services from the donor country.

Yeltsin is also expected to push for an extension of the holiday Russia has received through the end of 1993 on paying back $15 billion to the so-called Paris Club of Western creditor governments. The Russians would like that debt moratorium to apply to loans made by banks and other non-governmental lenders as well.

In Tokyo, “we don’t expect any decisions that will knock us off our feet,” Fyodorov told a press conference Monday.

Russia expects negotiations to start on releasing International Monetary Fund reserve credits and the delivery of $300 million in Western aid to small and medium-size businesses, and it hopes the G-7 will approve “at least $2 billion” for the Clinton-backed program of privatization financing, Fyodorov said.

But it is Cold War-era restrictions still fettering trade with Russia that seem to most upset the Moscow leadership. Russian academics have tallied 300 laws and regulations in the United States alone that discriminate against goods from Russia as though they still came from the Communist Soviet Union, said Vladimir N. Zuyev of the Institute of the World Economy and International Relations.

By Berger’s estimate, such restrictions--for example, a U.S. ban on launching American-made space hardware on Moscow’s booster rockets--cost the struggling Russian economy $3 billion in lost business last year alone.

Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev has served notice that Russia will now be pushing for its fair share of the worldwide arms, commercial space and nuclear engineering markets. With the demise of the Soviet Bloc, Russia’s weapons sales abroad have dropped to a fraction of the customary annual $50 billion, former Prime Minister Yegor T. Gaidar reports.

“If our exporters can normally trade, we won’t need any government credits,” Fyodorov maintained Monday.

Insisting on the cancellation of regulations that discriminate against Russia can only help Yeltsin at home, where opponents see him as a supine pro-Westerner. The Kremlin’s rapid approval of last month’s U.S. cruise missile bombardment of Baghdad only reinforced that view.

In April, G-7 ministers promised a package totaling $43.4 billion for Russia. But if the question of “What to do about Russia?” dominated in Munich, it is only one item on the Tokyo agenda. This week, the chief preoccupation of the leaders of the United States, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Canada and Britain will be how to jump-start their own economies, not Russia’s.

Yeltsin, who joins G-7 leaders Friday for the final day of the summit, will have to wait his turn.

As if the dreary economic performance of the West weren’t enough to dampen Russians’ expectations, there is the prickly matter of the summit’s venue: the capital of the G-7 member with which Russia has the worst relations.

“It’s a great misfortune that the meeting is being held in Tokyo, since Yeltsin just doesn’t want to go there,” Sergeyev said.

Twice, Russia’s leader has jilted the Japanese by abruptly canceling or postponing an official visit, most recently in May. The problem is the still hotly disputed status of four islands off Hokkaido that the Soviet army seized at the close of World War II.

The Japanese want any major improvement in Russo-Japanese relations to hinge on Moscow expressing its willingness to give back their “Northern Territories.” Yeltsin’s problem is that if he agrees to do much more than hear out the Japanese, his enemies at home will accuse him of being ready to relinquish Russian land.

As that territorial quarrel simmers, nearly two-thirds of the Japanese people oppose additional economic aid to Russia, a poll published last week by one Tokyo daily found. Yeltsin can hardly expect Japan, which as the host nation will play an especially important role at the summit, to be his advocate.