Yeltsin Back at Work, Hints at Changes : Russia: President returns after illness vowing to defend reforms. But he says impact on the people must be factored in.

MOSCOW — With much of Moscow down with the flu, President Boris N. Yeltsin returned to the Kremlin on Friday after two months of treatment for heart disease and stepped out in the snow to talk politics with passersby.

Meeting with ordinary citizens for the first time since falling ill, Yeltsin looked vigorous and vowed again to defend his post-Soviet reforms from the Communist-led parliament elected Dec. 17. “We won’t give anyone an opportunity to move backward,” he said.

But he said the election had taught politicians a lesson that “when reforming the national economy, they should not forget about people”--a likely sign of policy adjustments ahead.

Final official results Friday gave the resurgent Communist Party 157 of the 450 seats in the Duma, or lower house of parliament. The Communist total reached 187 with the seats won by three socialist splinter parties.

Right-wing nationalists won 56 seats, including 51 for Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky’s neo-fascist Liberal Democratic Party. That gave hard-line foes of Yeltsin’s free-market reforms enough seats to pass laws but not the two-thirds majority needed to override vetoes by the upper house or the president.

Our Home Is Russia, the party Yeltsin created behind Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, won 55 seats to lead a pro-reform bloc of 115. Centrists and independents got the rest.

*

While the swing against Yeltsin is not sharp enough to threaten Chernomyrdin’s government as a whole, the president is expected to announce or hint at Cabinet changes in a televised New Year’s Eve speech that he came to the Kremlin to record.

Yeltsin said Friday that he will wait until February to announce whether he will seek another five-year term in June elections. Then he added what sounded like a campaign pitch for the status quo:

“We’ve had enough experiments. The Russian people are fed up with experimenting. At present, Russia’s situation is such that if it gets pushed backward, trouble can happen.”

Despite temperatures hovering just above zero, the 64-year-old leader emerged hatless from a black Mercedes-Benz stretch limousine on the Kremlin grounds and spoke for several minutes as a small crowd gathered.

Television crews alerted in advance recorded the scene and aired a healthy-looking Yeltsin with a booming voice on the evening news.

*

Yeltsin was hospitalized Oct. 26 for the second time this year with acute ischemia, a disease that restricts the flow of blood to the heart. A month ago he moved to a government sanitarium, where he gradually resumed work under medical supervision. He went to his country home this week.

His return to health came at the peak of an influenza epidemic that has sickened much of the country. More than 700,000 Muscovites have fallen ill, and five have died of pneumonia, encephalitis and other illnesses complicated by flu. In other parts of the country, nine flu patients have died.

The same virus has spread west through Ukraine and across Russia’s Ural Mountains and Siberia to the Far East, aided by unseasonably cold weather, poor diets and unreliable heating in homes. Five flu patients have died in Ukraine.

Health services in Russia and Ukraine, already impoverished by post-Soviet cuts in public spending, have come under severe strain. Officials said there is not enough money to vaccinate all children and older people, who are most at risk. Some communities with money for disease prevention spent it all this year on diphtheria vaccines.

Fifty children with heart disease had to be discharged from a specialized hospital in Ukraine to make way for flu patients.

Schools in both countries closed early for the New Year holiday. Ukraine’s president and prime minister caught the flu and canceled public engagements. At one point during Yeltsin’s stay, the Kremlin sanitarium was quarantined against flu, cutting off the president’s personal contact with ministers and aides.

Special correspondent Mary Mycio in Kiev, Ukraine, contributed to this report.