RUSSIA: The First Aid Summit

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THE SETTING WAS MAJESTIC: A city of gleaming skyscrapers backed by magnificent snow-capped mountains, a Mediterranean-style villa perched on a splendid promontory overlooking the northern Pacific. The results of the weekend summit meeting in Vancouver, Canada, were inevitably less grandiose. Indeed, Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin hardly aimed at any readily measurable result. Dollars and cents may have been the language of discourse, but the effect was largely symbolic: to demonstrate that Yeltsin still has firm American support in his hour of trial, that Clinton is not quite an uninterested novice in foreign affairs and that the West really does care that Russia evolves into a free-market democracy.

Accordingly, this meeting was presented as a sober working session, shorn of the pageantry that enveloped the old superpower summits. There was no state dinner, no glittering receptions, only six-plus hours devoted largely to pie charts and spreadsheets. Canadian newspapers were more witty than accurate in % describing it as an "alms race" -- not when the donors are reluctant to cross the starting line. But Topic A was the vexing and indispensable subject of American and other Western aid to Russia, complete with details of how much, when and for what projects. It might well be dubbed the "First Aid Summit": it could do little more than start the patient on the road to recovery, but that was a great deal better than nothing.

Russia's transformation from central planning to a market economy and working democracy is a huge historic spectacle worthy of high summitry. As Clinton said in a speech last week to sell the proposition to skeptical Americans, the U.S. "cannot stop investing in the peace now that we have obtained it." But Vancouver is only a down payment -- for the U.S., a $1.6 billion down payment -- on a long-term commitment that will tax all the West's ingenuity and staying power, and Russia's own capacity to change, before it pays off.

Arriving at Vancouver in a driving rain that dampened his gray pompadour, the Russian leader pledged again to keep pressing for reform, whatever the opposition. "The Communists want to take revenge, to take us back to the past," he said. But "as long as there is President Yeltsin in power, then definitely my answer is yes, the reforms will continue."

Clinton, stepping from his plane a bit later, spoke soberly of the uncertainties surrounding any aid program, acknowledging that "future political events might undermine the impact." Still, he insisted, the future of Russian democracy is of such paramount importance that the West must "do what's right" to help, and he added, "I think that the kind of things we propose are likely to have lasting and tangible impact." Although Clinton's aides have made much of the idea that they are supporting democratic reform rather than Yeltsin per se, after the two Presidents had their first working session, spokesman George Stephanopoulos reported that his boss admired Yeltsin as a "true democrat" and "a fighter who is not deterred by long odds."