Bush, Putin set new tone for visit

MOSCOW -- President Bush opened a diplomatically sensitive 24-hour visit to the Russian capital yesterday and moved immediately to smooth over days of prickly exchanges with President Vladimir V. Putin about past Soviet tyranny and Russia's current drift toward authoritarianism.

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Bush and Putin embraced and smiled broadly as they greeted each other at the Russian presidential residence, then took a joyride in a vintage 1956 Soviet automobile and sat down to dinner together with their wives. The determined show of friendship appeared intended to demonstrate that the recent fracas about the Soviet legacy after World War II would not damage the relationship.

Aides said Bush raised concerns about Russian democracy during a private meeting with Putin, but Bush decided to keep it behind closed doors, at least until leaving town. Unlike normal practice overseas, the White House arranged a schedule in which Bush will give no speech or news conference while in Moscow to avoid spoiling Putin's big moment today as he hosts dozens of world leaders for a Red Square celebration of the 60th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany.

''I am looking forward to the celebration tomorrow," Bush said. ''It is a moment where the world will recognize the great bravery and sacrifice the Russian people made in the defeat of Nazism. The people of Russia suffered incredible hardship, and yet the Russian spirit never died out."

In praising Russian courage, he left out his assessments of recent days, when he pointed out that the end of World War II ushered in a half-century of Soviet oppression. Aides said that in the session they attended, Bush did not bring up the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 that resulted in Soviet occupation of the Baltic states, an agreement US officials had urged Putin to renounce.

The flap has threatened to eclipse the planned Victory Day celebration in which Bush will join Putin and more than 50 other leaders in reviewing a military parade in front of Lenin's tomb on Red Square and then attend a luncheon in the Kremlin. To acknowledge the mixed meaning of the anniversary, Bush stopped in Latvia, a tiny Baltic republic consigned to Moscow rule after the war.

Bush's statements and itinerary drew rebukes from Putin and his government. In comments before Bush's arrival, Putin said no apology was needed for Molotov-Ribbentrop because the pact was declared null and void in 1989. His aides renewed the old Stalinist argument that there was no occupation because the Baltic states supposedly asked to join the Soviet Union.

In a bid to coax Putin into acknowledging past mistakes, Bush gave a speech Saturday in Riga, the Latvian capital, in which he said the United States also shared some blame for the division of postwar Europe because of Franklin Roosevelt's participation in the Yalta conference of 1945. The successive Communist takeover of half of Europe, Bush added, was ''one of the greatest wrongs of history."

US and Russian officials insisted the dustup was actually a sign of the strong ties between the two leaders. ''It simply again underscores that these two men have developed a relationship in which they can talk about any subject and talk about it in a constructive and friendly manner," said Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.

Bush arrived in Moscow last night after spending the morning in the Netherlands honoring the sacrifice of US soldiers in World War II. Bush laid a wreath at a cemetery filled with US war dead and contemplated the meaning for today's generation.

''The world's tyrants learned a lesson," Bush told an audience of several thousand Americans and Dutch. ''There is no power like the power of freedom and no soldier as strong as a soldier who fights for that freedom."