CLINTON ZEROS IN ON RUSSIA'S PAST GLORY, TRAGEDY.

Byline: Alison Mitchell The New York Times

He said barely a word about the fevered electoral struggle over Russia's future. Instead, President Clinton, as if seeking sanctuary from the volatility of Russia's political scene, resolutely stayed focused Friday on the glory, the tragedy and the heroism of its past.

He laid a wreath at Piskarevsky cemetery, a burial site for the hundreds of thousands of men and women who died of starvation during the Nazis' siege of the city, then called Leningrad, in World War II.

He viewed the czarist treasures of the Hermitage Museum. In a frenzy of sightseeing, he toured the Russian Museum, the Kazan Cathedral, the Statue of Peter the Great and the Church on the Spilled Blood, where Alexander II was assassinated in 1881.

Keenly aware of the delicacy of being in Russia just months before its presidential election and wary that any overt support of Boris Yeltsin could backfire on the Russian president, Clinton followed an itinerary that administration officials hoped would act like a balm to Russia's wounded pride by treating the nation as still a great power.

By the time he flew out of St. Petersburg for a nuclear summit meeting in Moscow and a Sunday meeting with Yeltsin, Clinton had left behind a trail of television images of himself standing in awe before Russia's history in a kind of non-campaign campaign that touched some of the same chords as Yeltsin's own attempts to tie himself to the pre-Communist past.

It is an open secret inside the White House that the administration would dearly like to see Yeltsin defeat the resurgent Communists in the election. Even so, Clinton has been candid about his inability to do much for the man who has been his irascible but faithful ally.

Just last week he was aware of only one case in which an outsider affected an election in his home state, Arkansas: when Huey Long, the Louisiana populist, used up nine sets of tires in 1932 driving across Arkansas to help Hattie Caraway win a U.S. Senate seat.

Flying here Thursday night, when asked by reporters on the plane whether the nuclear summit meeting would help Yeltsin, the president said simply, ``I don't know.''

And moments after he touched down he received a taste of the nation's ambivalence toward Yeltsin. In an evening stop at the ornate Catherine Palace, Clinton was coaxed by tour guides to sit in Alexander I's chair and hold his quill pen.

``Yeltsin has never been allowed to sit there,'' Alexander Belyakov, a local official, told Clinton. ``Alexander never had to stand for re-election, did he?'' Clinton shot back.

But Friday the president avoided politics and devoted himself to Russian history in the hauntingly beautiful city that Peter the Great built as ``a window into Europe.''

As a young Rhodes scholar at Oxford University a quarter century ago, Clinton had hopped off a train bound for Moscow to see the city for a quick hour and a half. ``I just got out and walked the streets in a blinding snowstorm,'' Clinton reminisced, ``but I was young and strong and I didn't mind at all.''

Friday morning there was no snow, only an icy drizzle, and Clinton, bareheaded, walked slowly behind three goose-stepping military officers down the main walkway of Piskarevsky cemetery.

During World War II bodies were brought there by the hundreds of thousands as the city's people, in a monument to Russian endurance, starved - the death toll perhaps reaching 1 million - but refused to surrender to the Nazis' 900-day siege.

The soldiers placed a wreath of red and white roses. Clinton stood behind it, his head bowed. By the cemetery's eternal flame, before banks of television cameras, Clinton spoke of the siege when ``the citizens here wrote with their blood and defiance one of the greatest chapters in all the history of human heroism.'' The only other U.S. president to stop here was Richard M. Nixon, in 1972.

``This place is testimony to all the Russian people gave and all they lost in the great struggle of World War II,'' Clinton said. ``It calls out to all of us Russians and Americans alike to work together in peace for the common good for all our people and for the world.''

He also used the moment to remember the 168 Americans who died in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City one year ago Friday.

``Today in the somber spirit of this magnificent memorial to Russia's unforgotten and unforgettable sacrifice, I ask every American to join in a national moment of silence for the victims of Oklahoma city,'' he said.