All Joking Aside, Hillary Clinton Has the Last Laugh With Russians : Style: Before the First Lady's arrival, the media had fun at her expense. In person, she's won nothing but praise.

All Joking Aside, Hillary Clinton Has the Last Laugh With Russians : Style: Before the First Lady’s arrival, the media had fun at her expense. In person, she’s won nothing but praise.

By CAREY GOLDBERG

Jan. 15, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MOSCOW — The Russian public that once spurned Raisa Gorbachev as pushy took Hillary Rodham Clinton to its heart Friday, putting aside widely translated jokes about her assertiveness to praise her accomplishments and good looks.

Accompanied by her Russian counterpart, Naina Yeltsina, the American First Lady left a trail of admirers in her wake as she visited a hospital and the sights of the Kremlin.

“I think that the First Lady should first of all be pretty, that is why I liked Mrs. Clinton better” of the two wives, said Viktoria Zakharenko, a 12-year-old being treated for gastritis at the Savior’s Hospital for Peace and Charity in eastern Moscow. “And I also think that she should be very businesslike.”

Russian pundits used to savage Raisa Gorbachev, wife of former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, for daring to appear frequently by his side--in showy designer clothes to boot!--and to voice her opinions instead of staying out of sight like most past Kremlin wives.

Clinton’s prominent role in the Administration has struck much the same vein in the Russian mentality. Russian television and newspapers have repeated the Washington joke about her fictional comment that, if she had married a gas station attendant, he would have been President by now. Others, too, have made the rounds.

But when it came right down to it, when Clinton arrived in Moscow on Friday morning, she garnered nothing but compliments.

Her low-key touring with Yeltsina provided a harmonious, conflict-free sideshow to the summit, unlike the feud that festered between Raisa Gorbachev and former First Lady Nancy Reagan.

“Almost right away I got the feeling that we’ve known each other for a long time,” said Dr. Tamara Serookaya after a brief talk with Clinton. “She’s a very affable and accessible person with not a hint of snobbishness.”

Clinton’s easy manner did not seem to help Sergei Bychenko, an 11-year-old patient who studies at a special English school and had been thought capable of chatting with her. The dignitaries’ visit so stifled him with shyness that Yeltsina had to prompt him into the English, “Thank you,” for the American First Lady’s gift of a 100-piece dinosaur puzzle.

“I like puzzles, but I’m not very good at it,” Clinton told the three children in Bychenko’s ward, each of whom received a gift. “I usually have to get my daughter to help me.”

The two current first ladies differ greatly in personal style, with Yeltsina more of a retiring hausfrau uninvolved in affairs of state and Clinton acting almost like a Cabinet member. But their mutual interest in health care--Clinton has headed an American presidential task force on health care reform--helped them find common ground.

“Mrs. Yeltsin is very concerned about health care, especially children’s health care, which is also my main concern,” Clinton said. “I’m very pleased that Mrs. Yeltsin cares so much about children and is doing so much to keep them healthy, because I’m trying to do the same at home.”

Aware of the First Lady’s policy tasks, doctors at the hospital said they were impressed, rather than irritated as they used to be by Raisa Gorbachev’s political activities.

“Hillary Clinton produces the impression of being a very serious-thinking and profound person,” medical professor Lyubov Pushko said.

Tamara Bolshakova, chief nurse in the children’s ward, observed: “If I were Mr. Clinton, I would be very proud of such a wife. She can represent him anywhere in the world. She is like a second self.”

Pushko explained the discrepancy between Russians’ disdain for assertive Mrs. Gorbachev and praise for assertive Mrs. Clinton, claiming Raisa had seemed intent on pushing herself forward without having much substance--a deeply unfair but widely held opinion about the intelligent former Soviet First Lady, who has the Soviet equivalent of a Ph. D. in sociology. Mikhail Gorbachev, like Bill Clinton, also has acknowledged that he discussed many of his most serious decisions with his wife.

The only reservations about Hillary Clinton that surfaced in a dozen interviews came from bookkeeper Valentina Musatova, who said she thought the First Lady was “so insistent she can mislead her husband.”

Musatova, who was in the audience that watched President Clinton answer questions live on Russian television, said she had heard that Mrs. Clinton had insisted on her husband wearing his wedding ring, and she objected.

“I think it’s not obligatory, if a person has a conscience,” she said.

More typical was the reaction the American First Lady drew from a woman she greeted in one of the Kremlin cathedrals, a Kremlin employee who identified herself as Nina Vladimirovna.

“She’s very kind, very kind,” she said of Clinton. “I told her, ‘Happy new year and God bless you,’ and then when she took my hand, I just ran out of words.”

Alexei Kuznetsov of The Times Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.