Soviet Leader

TOKYO -- Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu ended 12 hours of summit talks early today without the "breakthrough" both had vowed to achieve in a territorial dispute that has stunted their countries' relations for four decades.Instead, they agreed to "accelerate" negotiations on the future of four small, flinty northern islands that Josef V. Stalin's forces seized in August 1945 as Japan surrendered at the end of World War II. The dispute has kept the two Far Eastern powers from signing a peace treaty formally ending that war.Mr.

MOSCOW -- President Mikhail S. Gorbachev warned yesterday that the Persian Gulf war is threatening to grow beyond the United Nations' mandate into a catastrophic regional conflict involving chemical and nuclear weapons.He said he was dispatching a personal envoy to Baghdad to meet Saddam Hussein and appealed again to the Iraqi leader to "display realism" and open the way to a settlement.The statement, released by the Tass news agency and read on television last night, said "developments in the gulf zone are taking an ever more alarming and dramatic turn."

MOSCOW -- Margaret Thatcher is singing his praises to Moscow students and Soviet parliamentarians. His spokesman says an early U.S.-Soviet summit is likely following an upbeat phone conversation Monday night with President Bush. His relations with Boris N. Yeltsin are the best in many months.Yesterday, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev flew off to the Kazakh republic for a meet-the-people tour of the kind he has generally avoided since the political freeze of last fall and winter. Next week, he goes to Oslo, Norway, to deliver the Nobel Peace Prize lecture.

In the spy novels, the United States always knows what's going on in the Soviet Union.We have moles there. Agents in place. Deep cover operatives. In the spy novels.In real life, however, our government seems to get its information on the Kremlin by watching CNN.Using the words "murky," "sketchy," and "not clear," President Bush made it apparent that he was murky, sketchy and not clear about what had happened to Mikhail Gorbachev on Monday.But Bush had a defense. "I think Gorbachev is as surprised as anybody, obviously," he said.

BERLIN -- When he came back to Germany to raise more money for his relief efforts in Siberia, Dr. Norman Methe expected an easy visit and a sympathetic audience.By Monday, however, he realized that his program was in trouble as more and more potential donors in his home country questioned why the Soviet Union needed help when it was able to send troops to Lithuania, kill 15 people and wound 160 more. Donations after a television appearance were down 50 percent from similar appeals a month earlier.

Mikhail S. Gorbachev's real occupancy of the principal seat of power in the former Soviet Union lasted for less than 6 1/2 years. Yet within that time, he changed the world.Not all of the changes were intentional. The disintegration of the Soviet Union was the last thing that Mr. Gorbachev had in mind when he embarked on the reconstruction (perestroika), or radical reform, of the Soviet system. He was, however, prepared to move from a desire to reform the system to an attempt to make it different in kind.

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine -- At least once and probably twice during U.S. Ambassador Robert S. Strauss' 40-minute meeting with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin Saturday, the two were interrupted by phone calls from Mikhail S. Gorbachev.The Soviet president was in the throes of resigning his position as leader of the Communist Party and reorganizing a government tainted by last week's failed coup, and he wanted Mr. Yeltsin's advice on personnel appointments and other matters they were handling together, Mr. Strauss said.

PARIS -- Leonid I. Brezhnev and other members of the Soviet Union's geriatric leadership, many of whom were ailing, regularly took a secret "rejuvenating" pill in the 1970s and '80s that was not only supposed to keep them going but make them more youthful.Official archives just published by the newspaper Moscow News reveal that the masters of the Kremlin during the final decades of the Soviet empire lived in a Byzantine atmosphere in which medical quackery and superstition were the order of the day.Historian Peter Bogdanov, a specialist in Soviet history at Paris University, said the documents make clear that this obsession with miraculous cures contributed to the political paralysis and economic stagnation that were soon to destroy the communist system.

MOSCOW -- In the end, not one of the men who plotted to rTC overthrow Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the 1991 failed coup will be punished: Gen. Valentin I. Varennikov, the last of 12 defendants, was acquitted of treason yesterday by the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court.That brought to a close a three-year trial of the coup leaders.The other leaders of the hard-line coup, whose collapse brought on the breakup of the Soviet Union, have either died, seen the cases against them dismissed because of poor health, or been pardoned under a general political amnesty declared by Parliament in February.

MIKHAIL S. GORBACHEV, the Kremlin leader who presided over the dissolution of the Soviet Union, is such an unpopular man in today's Russia that there is a tendency to write off his renewed presidential ambitions as a joke. This is a mistake.Although Mr. Gorbachev's comeback is hardly likely, the 65-year-old former communist chief could perform a valuable service to his country by conducting a campaign so tightly focused on issues that it would force President Boris N. Yeltsin and Gennady Zyuganov, the neo-communist candidate, to outline their specific policies for Russia's future.