September 2, 1998
SUMMIT IN MOSCOW: THE SCENE
Summit Meeting Teeters on Edge of Self-Parody
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By MICHAEL WINES
MOSCOW -- As President and Mrs. Clinton prepared to retire Tuesday night
at the Marriott Hotel near the banks of the Moscow River, a car pulled over
not far from the hotel entrance. The doors opened, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the
ultranationalist who controls a bloc of seats in Russia's parliament, climbed out.
Zhirinovsky turned toward the hotel and yelled, in so many exceptionally unprintable
words, "Clinton, you are an idiot!" After applying the coarsest description of sexual
relations to the president, he added, "Your dollar is dirt, and this dirt is all over the
world!"
He then produced a dollar in his hand and told his supporters, "Burn it." They did.
Tuesday evening, Moscow television broadcast videotape of the event in its entirety,
barely-bleeped epithets and all.
This sort of disgrace would never have happened if Leonid Brezhnev still ran things.
But Brezhnev and the Soviet Union are dead, Boris Yeltsin is alive and, by several
accounts still kicking, and U.S.-Russian summitry -- still somber and inflated as ever --
now teeters at times on the slippery brink of self-parody.
Depending on one's point of view, Moscow right now is either no place for such a
worldly event or the perfect place.
The contrasts between old-style superpower summitry and the current state of the two
old superpowers -- and their leaders -- is simply too great to ignore.
The public aspects of this summit meeting have been scripted almost entirely for
television; some events, such as a wreath-laying in Red Square this morning, were
staged solely for cameras and a small pool of reporters.
Clinton and Yeltsin dutifully mugged for the cameras all day like devoted friends,
exchanging bear hugs, gifts and tributes to the enduring friendship of their nations at
almost every public opportunity.
Yeltsin, looking reasonably hale, good-naturedly stiffed news photographers by turning
his back on them during one ceremony.
Clinton, ever gregarious, practiced staff-written Russian-language platitudes on
crowds all day. Beyond the range of the lens, however, the economy is unavoidable.
As the Clintons and the Yeltsins and some 115 other luminaries dined in the Kremlin
on Tuesday night on pike rasstegai, salmon, roast-beef-stuffed omelet and the
obligatory wine and caviar, Muscovites a few blocks away were resting after a day of
methodically picking grocery shelves clean of food and dry goods they fully expect will
soon disappear.
Moscow newspapers reported Tuesday that ships loaded with imported goods, now a
huge share of Russian purchases, were turning away or refusing to unload because of
the fiscal uncertainty. Non-perishables like grain, oils and, in St. Petersburg,
refrigerators were vanishing from stores, and prices in some instances had reportedly
doubled.
Olympic-quality runners, fearful of being injured in a coup, threatened to desert a
world-class track meet this weekend. The Russian Olympic Committee was hampered
in responding, because its electricity had been turned off for nonpayment.
And that was merely the Russian side of the economic equation. Moments after
Clinton finished cutting a fat loaf of Russian bread Tuesday morning in Yeltsin's
marble-and-bronze Kremlin study, the two men were jerked back to reality by a CBS
News correspondent who suddenly asked: What about the economy?
The correspondent, Scott Pelley, was seeking a response from Clinton about
Monday's 500-point drop in the stock market. But the question could just as easily
have been asked of Yeltsin, whose nation's own stock market has shed 60 per cent of
its blue-chips' value in the last two months alone.
Pelley was escorted from the room by Russian officials and briefly stripped of his
press credentials for breaking a promise to be silent.
As Zhirinovsky demonstrated, the respect usually accorded to summit-conference
participants has gone largely by the boards this week.
Mrs. Clinton played a decided second Tuesday to Naina Yeltsin as the two toured a
factory, and Mrs. Yeltsin decried the lack of women's roles in business. Mrs. Clinton
was even asked point-blank about her outlook in the wake of the president's
admission that he carried on a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky inside the
White House.
"I've been getting along fine," Mrs. Clinton responded; reporters later analyzed her
body language and facial expressions during a joint appearance with Clinton at a
Russian public school. Clinton also suffered his share of slings. In downtown Moscow,
a British manager of a fine-arts reproduction company was selling a special edition of
Russian nesting dolls, featuring the likenesses of Clinton, Ms. Lewinsky and three
other women with whom he has been said to have had -- or tried to have -- some
involvement.
The manager, David Segal, said the $35 dolls, made of linden and hand-painted, "are
being produced as fast as the people can get the stock for them."
Segal said he was merely doing his part for the Russian economy. "We're going to
have most of one village turning them out," he said in an interview this week.
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