MINSK BLASTS YELTSIN AS “GORBACHEV” AFTER POSTPONEMENT OF SUMMIT.

Belarusan Foreign Minister Ivan Antanovich regards Russian President Boris Yeltsin as a latter-day Mikhail Gorbachev–and does not mean it as a compliment. Interviewed on Belarusan television, the foreign minister accused Yeltsin of following Gorbachev’s example in allowing Western statesmen to “constantly foist their views on him. The Western visitor’s stream [to Yeltsin] is strongly reminiscent of their stream in 1991 to Gorbachev, whom they also would not leave alone for even a minute.”

Antanovich was reacting to the Kremlin’s postponement of an emergency summit with Belarusan President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, which had tentatively been scheduled for September 16 at Lukashenka’s request in order to devise joint anticrisis measures (Belarusan TV, September 13; Itar-Tass and other Russian agencies, September 14). Antanovich, a former CPSU Central Committee official in Moscow, was considered–and passed over–by Gorbachev for the post of leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Antanovich only made it to that anti-reform party’s Politburo in 1990-91.

AGRICULTURAL MOLDOVA TRIES TO EXTRICATE ITSELF FROM RUSSIAN MARKET.