Message from Moscow.

Mr. Almond is a lecturer in modern European history at Oriel College, Oxford.

FROM Washington to London the message of V-E Day was clear: reconciliation with old enemies was the order of the day. Bill Clinton brought that idea with him to Moscow. Everyone is aware that triumph in the war against Hitler was quickly followed by tragedy, the drawing down of Stalin's Iron Curtain across Europe. Clinton's speech at the opening (ten years late) of the massive war memorial outside Moscow (designed under Brezhnev for the fortieth anniversary, but only just completed) was typically apologetic. He claimed the Cold War had obscured the Soviet Union's sacrifices from the West, but implied that it was the West's fault.

There were no apologies from the Russians for the Stalinist past. The "great leader" was praised for his wartime role, and no mention was made of the Nazi - Soviet Pact. Military glory was the dominant, in fact the only, tone of the Russian celebrations. Some bedraggled American peaceniks sat around disconsolately in my hotel lobby wearing the only "doves of peace" I saw in Moscow.

Boris Yeltsin skillfully used the Western leaders' homage to past sacrifices to bolster the real message of Moscow's fiftieth-anniversary celebrations: Russia is back as a superpower under his leadership. The fact that Clinton snubbed London but came to Moscow was a big plus for Yeltsin, but the Russian president piled on tests of the American President's mettle to show just how far Clinton will go to avoid an embarrassing rift.

The savage war of reconquest by Yeltsin's troops in Chechnya was just the first hurdle Mr. Clinton had to overcome. Even Jimmy Carter ducked out of the Moscow Olympics after the invasion of Afghanistan, but Clinton is made of sterner stuff; he wanted to drink the cup of humiliation to the bottom. Various snubs to U.S. interests have come from the Kremlin since Mr. Clinton agreed to come to Moscow, but the most gratuitous has been the Russian deal with Iran to supply nuclear reactors, camouflaged by his late concession not to supply a nuclear centrifuge.

What makes Yeltsin's ploy with Iran so puzzling is that even Soviet leaders never played so openly with fire. After all, Iran borders the ex-Soviet republics and is nearer to Moscow than to Washington. Russian spokesmen justify the sale on pure economic self-interest. Perhaps they really are the sort of profit-obsessed capitalists Lenin ridiculed as likely to sell the rope for their own hangings, but if that is so it is most unsettling.

Stalin and his successors were brutal but not rash. They did not even give the Bomb to China. Of course, the whole deal with Iran may be a risky ploy to push President Clinton into making further concessions.

Russia has just announced that it is going to break the CFE treaty (Conventional Forces in Europe) unilaterally by deploying a new army group in the sensitive Caucasus region. Elsewhere in the former Soviet Union Russian pressure on nominally independent states grows. Will Clinton trade their rights for the Kremlin's backdown on nuclear exports to Iran?

Or will he, as many fear, agree to a long-standing demand from the Kremlin -- dating from Soviet days -- to ban any renewal of the Star Wars project? There may be method in Yeltsin's apparent nuclear madness with Iran.

By allowing our modern cult of anniversaries to dictate his summit timing with Yeltsin, Clinton allowed himself to be maneuvered into a weak position. Summits have to end in smiles and success for an American President to get the bonus in the polls, but cheap ratings can prove costly in the long term.

The message from Moscow fifty years after the Second World War is that military pride -- plus modern hardware -- is about all Russia can muster. Worse, after a few years of post - Cold War flirting with Washington, the Kremlin now seems set on asserting herself. Anyone who saw the scores of thousands of Communist demonstrators in Moscow on V-E Day can see that anti-Western feeling has a potential groundswell behind it as it never did under Communism. Yeltsin may only be responding to this pressure, but that offers little comfort to Russia's neighbors.