Cagey About a Russian Bear

Why did Boris Yeltsin not take the bear? The jury is still out on the real reason the president refused the gift of a bear cub from his hosts in the Far East Amur region, although Itar-Tass readily supplied the prosaic official answer -- the cub's cage would not fit in the presidential limousine. Russian Television offered another theory: The president, out of concern for his increasingly nationalist country's image in the West, did not want to be seen embracing the Russian bear, as it were.It is a plausible explanation, given that the traditional Western image of the Russian bear -- big, dangerous, unpredictable and capable of causing great damage with one swipe of his paw -- has made a comeback.This week Yeltsin's Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, sounded very bearish in warning that the crisis in Yugoslavia could break out into a world war, or at least a return to Cold War hostilities between Russia and the United States.Never mind that Kozyrev was referring to calls to lift an arms blockade against Bosnia, an idea that most non-Bosnians outside Washington's beltway believe would cause a rapid escalation of the conflict rather than peace. And never mind that Kozyrev's alarmist remarks barely concealed his real message, a threat to the Bosnian Serbs to accept peace or lose Russian support. The image of an aggressive Russian bear is hard to shed and what stuck in people's minds was the threat of war. A day after Kozyrev spoke, Russian troops in Georgia took up positions to intervene in a conflict with breakaway Abkhazia. Yeltsin and Georgian leader Eduard Shevardnadze call the troops peacekeepers, but many Georgian legislators have protested the use of Russian troops, charging that Moscow helped the Abkhaz separatists drive the Georgian army out of the Black Sea region. Neutral observers allow that Russia should be able to use peacekeeping troops in its backyard, but not without reference to Russia's imperial past.And then there are the Baltics, where the bear metaphor is invoked every time Russian troop withdrawal negotiations hit a snag. All of this might have been whizzing around in Yeltsin's brain when he turned down his ursine gift. But there is one problem with this explanation.Russians have never seen their bear as the snarling, nasty, unpredictable beast portrayed in 19th-century political cartoons. The bear of local folklore is an ambling, awkward creature of abundant strength. But it usually has a heart of gold and is lacking in such negative qualities as unpredictability or viciousness. Or take the hero of Chekhov's short story "The Bear": A big, rude hulking fellow pesters a lady landowner for money she owes him; in the end, they fall in love and get married.Large, powerful, awkward, harmless unless disturbed -- these are the associations most Russians make when asked for an bear metaphor for their country. They describe the bear as a snarling predator only when provoked, probably because more Russians have seen bears at work in the circus than in the woods.Yeltsin is not known as a woodsman, and although surely he's been briefed by his aides on the foreign version, the president probably accepts the domestic bear metaphor.So why didn't he accept the cub? There might be a third reason.Bears, Itar-Tass tells us, were a traditional gift to the old Russian tsars. Various Russian tsars kept their own bears around for various purposes, from entertainment to punishment -- one threw one's enemies to the bears, lions not being available.Yeltsin has looked rather tsarish recently. He has issued decrees left and right, irking parliament by consciously overlooking procedure. His decree on fighting crime has alarmed even his reformist allies, who see in the edict the vestiges of a return to authoritarian rule. Local political observers have wondered what happened to the presidential elections Yeltsin promised for June 12 as proof of his commitment to democracy after dissolving the old parliament in September. Top government officials speak aloud of a proposal to prolong Yeltsin's presidency until 1998. Yeltsin, ever conscious of his political image, may have thought twice about emblazoning the tsar image in people's minds. Or could the reason lie in simple home economics? Unlike the tsars, Yeltsin does not have a palace menagerie to keep his bears in, just a simple apartment. Knowing that the cub would produce an odor which Naina Yeltsin would not likely bear, he did the wise thing and turned it down.