Yeltsin

SUNDAY'S parliamentary election in Russia was a dress rehearsal for next summer's presidential race, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin now looks unassailable.For a man who was not a parliamentary candidate, the former KGB officer campaigned hard. Mr. Putin's crowning moment came when he showed his fitness and gymnastic prowess to the nation by performing vaults on television.The message was clear: Compare me with the doddering President Boris N. Yeltsin! Compare me with Yevgeni Primakov, the septuagenarian former spy chief and foreign minister, who recently underwent hip replacement surgery!

MOSCOW -- Sergei Dorenko, television news commentator, sighs as he considers the cross he bears: Every week, as 40 million viewers across Russia watch in disgust and satisfaction, he crucifies Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov."

BEIJING -- China and Russia sent a stern message yesterday to the United States: You may be the only superpower, but don't try running our worlds.The message came as Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin wrapped up a two-day, informal summit here with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.In a joint statement, the two leaders used veiled language to accuse the United States of imposing its culture and values on the rest of the world and of using human rights as a pretext for meddling in the internal affairs of other nations.

MOSCOW -- Eight years to the day after Boris N. Yeltsin met in a hunting lodge with his Ukrainian and Belarussian counterparts to undo the Soviet Union and deliver its 12 remaining republics into independence, a wobbly Yeltsin signed an agreement here yesterday to reunite Russia with Belarus.It wasn't the first time the two countries have agreed to this, and it probably won't be the last. But yesterday's Kremlin ceremony had all the trappings of what is supposed to be the first meaningful step toward union.

Could life after communism have turned out better for Russia and its former Soviet neighbors? Mikhail Gorbachev insists that it could have. And things are so dismal today that his argument, tainted as it is by self-justification, is worth a fair hearing.In the eight years since Boris Yeltsin used the aftermath of the failed coup against Gorbachev to maneuver his rival from power, the Russian economy has shrunk steadily and natural riches have been spirited abroad. Wealth has been monopolized by a handful of unprincipled oligarchs while millions have slipped into destitution.

MOSCOW -- In an apparent miscalculation, the Kremlin demanded a showdown vote over Russia's chief prosecutor in the upper house of parliament yesterday and was handed an embarrassing defeat.The Federation Council, as the upper house is known, refused to accept President Boris N. Yeltsin's dismissal of Yuri Skuratov, who began to make trouble for the president and his inner circle a year ago with the opening of an investigation into kickbacks by Mabetex, a Swiss construction company.The vote shows that regional leaders who sit on the council are not interested in smothering the blossoming corruption scandals and that the Unity political bloc set up by Yeltsin's associates for the December elections is short on influence.

MOSCOW -- Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin was taken to the Central Clinical Hospital yesterday morning suffering from what his press secretary described as the flu accompanied by a high fever.Dmitri Yakushkin, the Kremlin press secretary, said Yeltsin, 68, had not felt well Friday but refused to go into the hospital until yesterday. Yakushkin said the president would stay in the hospital for at least two days.Yeltsin, now less than a year away from finishing his second four-year term in office, has been in poor health for years.

MOSCOW -- The literary historian Dmitri Sergeyevich Likhachev, who learned about hopelessness and survival first in a Soviet prison camp in the 1920s and again in blockaded Leningrad during World War II, died yesterday in St. Petersburg. He was 92.Mr. Likhachev was Russia's most respected scholar, a man whose eloquently expressed dark views about the course of Russian culture brought him attention until nearly the last days of his life. He embodied his country's painful 20th century history in a way no other intellectual could claim -- from a remembered glimpse of Alexis, the heir to the Romanov throne, in St. Petersburg before the Russian Revolution, to his work as adviser on cultural affairs to President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Here is an excerpt of an editorial from the Los Angeles Times, which was published Sunday.THE DATE to watch in Russia is Dec. 18. That's when voters will choose the 450 members of the Duma, the lower house of parliament, a choice that could do much to shape their country's future, including its relations with the West.With Boris N. Yeltsin's presidency a shambles and the Duma dominated by the naysaying Communist Party and its allies, Russians growing ever more desperate for better lives appear ready for change.

MOSCOW -- Former Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov united with Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov yesterday in a broad-based coalition that many analysts say is positioned to dominate Russia's parliamentary elections in December and undercut President Boris N. Yeltsin's hopes of installing his chosen successor in next year's presidential elections.The union of Primakov and Luzhkov, two of the best-known political figures in Russia, could enable the new Fatherland-All Russia political movement to capture control of the now-Communist-dominated State Duma, the lower house of parliament, then vault toward the 2000 presidential elections, analysts said.