Thursday afternoon was consumed by a multi-hour preliminary negotiating session led by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Russia's Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov. According to a senior administration official, the scene was almost comical, as 18 people jammed into a hotel suite where the bed had been replaced by a table. With refreshments consisting only of fizz water, the U.S. repeatedly pressed the Russians to make some preliminary commitments and the Russians repeatedly replied that each point was an issue to be decided by the two presidents. "Our impression is that the Russians very much like to have issues for the two leaders to thrash out," the official said. "It's part of their conception for a summit.... It's a czarist, communist tradition of leadership from the top."

Still, the U.S. was not exactly a picture of accommodation. On ABMs, for example, Primakov started to argue that the two sides should not formally agree on any of the points until all of them were settled. "Nyet!" Albright replied, without waiting for the translation.

If there was a true turning point on the NATO issue, one senior administration official said, it came during Albright's visit to Moscow three weeks ago, when Primakov said -- first in a private session with Albright, and then in their news conference -- that Russia opposed NATO expansion and wants to minimize the negative consequences. According to this official, the second part of that statement marked the first time the Russians had expressed to the Americans their basic acceptance of the fact that this is going to happen. Since then, he added, the tenor of the back and forth has been markedly different, with meetings intensifying and more paper being passed back and forth. It was after that statement, too, that Albright proposed that Primakov visit Washington (as he did earlier this week) shortly before the summit.

This being the 11th meeting of the two leaders, and the Cold War being history, the whole concept of a summit has lost a lot of its drama and tension. It now feels sort of mundane. Nor did the imagery of Clinton's arrival help things much: Because of his injury, he had to be unloaded from Air Force One by a truck whose cargo area, which was equipped with a lift, was labeled "Finnair Catering."

Nor was that the only indignity. White House spokesman Mike McCurry says Clinton had a restless night Thursday, thanks to the loud banging of the pipes to the sauna above his room. He later joked with Yeltsin that the Russian president had hired a large Finn to jump up and down on the roof. That wacky Clinton humor...

Among the thousands of reporters covering Madeleine Albright's star turn at her first U.S.-Russian summit as secretary of state is one Joe Albright, a Moscow correspondent for Cox Newspapers and the husband who unceremoniously dumped Albright for a younger woman years ago. It may be their first such encounter. Albright has often joked to friends that every time she happened to be in Moscow on official business in the past, Joe somehow managed to find some breaking news to cover out in some former Soviet Republic.

Was that man at the news conference the same Boris Yeltsin who only two days ago was talking in terms of Russia's non-negotiable positions? Looking shrunken, wan and stiff -- a statue, except for the eyes that kept darting from side to side -- Yeltsin at his news conference was a model of conciliation. In other words, he acted precisely as U.S. officials had so earnestly hoped. Over and over, he used the word partnership. And for the first time, Yeltsin in his statements explicitly accepted the inevitability of NATO enlargement, saying that he still opposed it but adding that he was acting "in order to minimize the negative consequences for Russia."

Behind the scenes, U.S. officials said, Clinton was negotiating with a new Yeltsin. In the past he would dismiss technical questions, saying they should be left "to the generals." This time, he was eager to engage on such complex and technical matters as missile velocity. He had index cards, but did not refer to them often. At one point, he corrected Foreign Minister Primakov on a technical question concerning theater nuclear weapons. "He was much more measured, somewhat less flamboyant, much more into the details of some of the discussions," one official said.

Clinton had anticipated this, the official added, and had insisted on double the number of pre-summit briefings that had originally been planned. The official quoted Clinton as telling aides: "Boris will be here at this summit a lot better prepared than at previous summits."

To some extent, however, the change also reflects the changing nature of U.S.-Russian summits, in general, to a far more technical, detailed discussion, rather than the Cold War exchanges of sweeping political principles.

It is worth noting that it was Madeleine Albright's first test in this sort of situation. She was, the official said, "a lot less formal than Chris [predecessor Warren Christopher] was." Where Christopher might interject only once or twice with a set of carefully crafted points, Albright joined the discussion frequently.

More significant was her role in getting that elusive ABM-TMD deal. According to one official, after several fruitless attempts here, the two presidents finally ordered their foreign ministers this afternoon to get a deal on the issue. Primakov made an offer that Lynn Davis, the undersecretary for international security and arms control, studied, and then pronounced inadequate, in that it would not finally close off the issue. When Primakov refused to budge, Albright walked out, saying, "Then, we don't have a deal." It was in that atmosphere that lower-level aides finally huddled and came up with the language that worked.

Perhaps the greatest measure of how much Yeltsin gave was the fact that he was already defending himself from a suggestion by a Russian reporter that he had caved in on security issues because he had, in essence, been bought off by the "financial generosity" the U.S. had displayed. He denied it, saying he had not even known about that aspect when he made the other deals, because economic issues were discussed last. That, of course, was more than a little disingenuous. If Yeltsin did not know in advance that economic aid was forthcoming, he was the only person here who had not been told.