‘We’re Back In The U.S.S.R.’ Kremlin Choreographs Events To Conceal Yeltsin’s Condition

As far as the Kremlin’s openness about the health of Russia’s leader is concerned, it can be said that “we’re back in the U.S.S.R.”

It is back to the days when analysts examined television footage for hours to detect if a purported public venue really was a hospital room subjected to a little stagecraft.

The time is back when official statements are not exactly untruthful but are more telling in what they leave out than for the few words that carefully are chosen.

Once again, forced to speculate in an information vacuum, scholars, diplomats and journalists are engaged in endless debates about who is being groomed as heir apparent when the current leader’s days seem so distressingly numbered.

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin reportedly returned to the Kremlin for three hours Tuesday.

But accounts of his health and appearance were mostly secondhand, and the official scurrying to show him in action seemed to prove little more than that he still is breathing.

A Kremlin cameraman was authorized to provide a few seconds of television footage showing a bright-eyed Yeltsin toddling toward Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, then being seated at an office table for discussions.

But no sound accompanied the footage, and no one outside the Kremlin inner circle was privy to the rare office visit.

“This situation reminds one of the last days of Konstantin Chernenko,” Sergei Markov, a political analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center, said in comparing Yeltsin’s staged appearances with the heavily edited glimpses Russians got of their last leader to die in office.

After a 13-month stint in power, the wheezing and frail Chernenko died in March 1985 at age 73.

Recalling one highly choreographed shot of Chernenko congratulating visitors to his “office” on International Women’s Day - two days before his death - Markov said the film was taken at an awkward angle to obscure the fact that the hospitalized leader had no pants on.

Concern about Yeltsin’s health, despite repeated assurances from his aides that his condition is improving, has soared since Friday’s announcement that a Moscow meeting of former Soviet republic leaders has been canceled.

The concern took on new severity Monday when the Kremlin conceded the president still is not well enough to make a one-day trip to the Netherlands next week.

Tuesday, President Clinton sought to downplay the issue, saying in a news conference he has no information to contradict Kremlin accounts of Yeltsin’s health.

Clinton said he expected a summit with Yeltsin to be held in March in Washington, as planned.