Russia Joins Space Station Project; U.S. Shuttle to Include Cosmonaut

Russia on Thursday formally joined the international space station project and signed a space cooperation agreement with the United States that will bring Moscow $400 million for space activities and put a Russian cosmonaut on a U.S. shuttle mission for the first time early next year.

Moscow and Washington also initialed 16 other agreements on matters ranging from nuclear-power plant safety to the conversion of Russian defense industries for civilian uses.

U.S. Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin executed the agreements after two days of talks under the auspices of a commission they jointly chair to foster U.S.-Russian cooperation on a broad front of technology, investment, energy and environmental issues.

Although the scale of many of the projects is small and the substance of many of the agreements is not new, the signing ceremony Thursday at a Moscow hotel symbolized the continuing U.S. effort to shore up the government of Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin through trade and aid.

The Clinton Administration hopes that by closely embracing Russia across a wide spectrum of activities it will help consolidate efforts toward political and economic reform. The mission has taken on an added urgency this week in the wake of an unexpectedly strong showing by Communists and ultranationalists in parliamentary voting Sunday.

A top U.S. official here for the Gore-Chernomyrdin talks said that the entire process is designed to reassure Western governments and potential investors that Russia is both responsible enough and politically stable enough to warrant increased aid and investment. “A great many of the projects are designed precisely to help Russia to convince the West it is not a black hole,” he said.

Among the deals signed Thursday were a $400-million contract with the Russian Space Agency for supplies and services for future joint U.S.-Russian manned space flights; a new tax treaty governing corporations operating in Russia; federal insurance protection for mining and manufacturing projects here; a pilot program to improve Russia’s retail gasoline operations, and an umbrella agreement regarding science and technology cooperation.

Before leaving Moscow for St. Petersburg on Thursday night, Gore also visited the Lenin Library on behalf of the New York-based Chabad Lubavitch Jewish sect, which has been fighting Russian authorities for years over a collection of holy books.

As a senator, Gore campaigned for the books’ release, a cause that had also been embraced by the late Los Angeles industrialist Armand Hammer.

On Thursday, Russian Culture Minister Yevgeny Y. Sidorov presented Gore with one of the estimated 12,000 books as a gesture of goodwill but without promising to turn over the rest of the volumes.