Yeltsin Targets Crime as No. 1 Russia Problem

Admitting that Russia is mired in chaos and crime, President Boris N. Yeltsin proposed a new regime of law, order and political cooperation on Thursday in his first State of the Nation speech to the new Parliament.

He struck such a conciliatory note that he did not even mention the lawmakers’ defiant vote on Wednesday to pardon all his political foes who face charges for their roles in the 1991 coup attempt and last October’s Moscow clashes.

Instead, he declared that Russia’s period of conflict was at an end.

Political battles “can have only one outcome--the destruction of Russia,” said Yeltsin, looking fit if sounding a bit hoarse as he spoke in the Kremlin’s Marble Hall. “The time for the internecine struggle for Russia has fully run out.”

He argued that the government must rather concentrate its energy on fighting crime--”the question of the year”--and making sure that the country’s laws are solid and enforced. He also asserted that Russia’s market-oriented economic reforms will continue full-force, though under better regulation.

Yeltsin sounded one combative note--on foreign policy, a subject he addresses at home infrequently.

Henceforth Russia will assert its national interests more vigorously, he vowed, citing his government’s recent role in the Bosnian crisis as evidence that it will not tolerate being ignored. Russia will take more responsibility for peacekeeping operations in the former Soviet Union and for defending ethnic Russians living in the former Soviet republics, he added.

But the 49-minute televised speech offered little new overall, and its generalities prompted more than one Parliament member to comment that it resembled a typical gust of hot air from a Communist Party general secretary in the old days.

But it was perhaps most interesting in what it did not say.

Yeltsin abandoned his old habit of accusing Communists and opposition members of causing most of the country’s ills. He made no threats. He strove to raise his presidential role above the political fray, to become the lofty figure envisioned in the constitution who gives the country its direction and then stands back.

By admitting that his government is riddled with corruption and confusion, Yeltsin also showed a new awareness of his own responsibility for many of the problems that economic reforms have brought.

The main slogan of his speech, “Stronger Russian Statehood,” amounted to a call to straighten out the country beginning with his own bureaucrats.

Economist Pavel Bunich was encouraged by what the speech did not say about the reforms: Yeltsin did not say he agreed with conservative Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin on the need to resort to such drastic means as freezing prices or salaries to stem inflation.

“It was key that the president confirmed the continuation of the course of reforms,” Bunich told the daily newspaper Izvestia.

He also praised Yeltsin’s tact in not mentioning the Parliament’s amnesty for the alleged coup plotters and the October rebels.

In the past, Yeltsin would probably have struck back at Parliament immediately. But his inability to work with his old Parliament led to the loss of more than 140 lives in the fighting that followed his decree dissolving it last fall.

On Thursday, he simply commented pointedly that social harmony does not mean “forgiving everything” and that mercy should not contradict the laws of morality.

The fate of the imprisoned leaders of the October rebellion, including former Vice President Alexander V. Rutskoi and former Supreme Soviet Chairman Ruslan I. Khasbulatov, remained unclear Thursday night.

Yeltsin’s spokesman, Vyacheslav V. Kostikov, said the legal battle over whether lawmakers had the right to issue the amnesty would last long enough so that the accused plotters would not be let out in “the coming weeks or months.”

However, Russia’s chief prosecutor, Alexei Kazannik, indicated that as soon as he got the paperwork from the Parliament he would drop the cases against the alleged plotters as instructed and release them.

The Itar-Tass news agency carried the text of the amnesty Thursday night, satisfying the requirement that the document be published to come into force.

Relatives of some of the accused held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison waited outside in the heavy snow for hours hoping for their release, but eventually they gave up.

Lawmakers who voted overwhelmingly for the amnesty said they saw it as paving the way for greater political harmony.

Yeltsin called for exactly the same thing in his speech, but it remained to be seen whether he would go along with letting all his worst enemies out of jail.

In his speech, Yeltsin complained that during Russia’s transition from the old Communist system to a market-driven economy, “those who cheat and use violence are having a field day.”

Using some of his strongest language yet about the crime problem, he said “the country is being swept by a crime wave,” and organized crime is trying to “get the country by the neck.” He called rampant bribery “a grave disease of the young Russian state.”

“Let us at long last recognize that so far we have a weak state and that there is no elementary order in the country,” he said in a virtual admission of his own failure.

As a remedy for Russia’s many ills, he proposed the stable base of the country’s new constitution, passed on Dec. 12.

With that new foundation, Yeltsin argued, the country could start to build law and order, beginning with anti-crime laws passed by the new Parliament.

He also promised greater assistance to Russia’s factories, many of which are grinding to a halt under both a tremendous tax burden and the difficulties of making it in the market system. At the same time, he demanded a halt to the government practice of granting giant subsidies and cheap loans to whatever enterprises lobby the best.

In Washington, Secretary of State Warren Christopher praised Yeltsin’s speech, saying it “came down in favor of continuation of reform.”

“From what I saw, he was in a strong, vigorous mood and made a strong, vigorous speech, which is a good sign in itself,” Christopher told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.