Yeltsin Says He’s Back in Business

Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, sidelined by heart trouble for six months, said he will return to work in the Kremlin on Monday with a crackdown on tax cheats as his top priority.

“The country needs an active and energetic president, especially now,” Yeltsin said Friday in his first televised remarks since bypass surgery Nov. 5. “I feel my recovery period is over. . . . The doctors did everything expected of them and more. Now it’s the president’s turn.”

The 65-year-old leader looked trimmer and appeared to breathe more easily than he did before the operation. He sat stiffly in an easy chair, reading from a prompter, but his message and delivery were forceful.

Russia has been plagued in recent months by labor unrest caused by growing delays in the payment of wages to millions of teachers, miners and other state employees.

Tax revenue has fallen 30% below target, in part because of political uncertainty spawned by Yeltsin’s illness.

Communist leader Gennady A. Zyuganov commented this month that Russia “has a nonworking president who is constantly being translated into a working language by his press secretary”--a slap at the biweekly briefings on edicts Yeltsin issues from bed.

Yeltsin acknowledged Friday that “many problems . . . have accumulated” during his convalescence. Calling wage delays an “intolerable” result of tax dodging that starves the budget, he said he will summon his Emergency Tax Commission next week to step up pressure on companies owing $9.3 billion.

“Lists of the biggest delinquents are ready,” he said. “They must know already that they will be brought to account.”

Signaling a purge of his administration, Yeltsin said officials who “relaxed in my absence” will be called to account for “the people’s living standards. . . . We will part with those who cannot face the people.”

He criticized no one by name.

His priorities in the coming weeks appear to have been determined by opinion polls. After wages, he said, Russians worry more about the decline of their bloated, underfunded army; he promised a reform that would both reduce and strengthen it.

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Yeltsin’s appearance, taped by a Kremlin crew at a hunting lodge north of Moscow, was made to look like an interview, although he was evidently reading his lines. The 6 1/2-minute clip, shown on the evening news, struck many here as vintage Yeltsin--a tough-talking politician much like the incumbent who won reelection last summer on the same promises he had made and ignored in the past.

“It was a collection of platitudes, recycled from the election campaign,” said political scientist Andrei Piontkowski of Moscow’s Center for Strategic Studies. “The important thing is that he’s safe and well.”

Yeltsin suffered a heart attack days before the July 3 runoff against Zyuganov and, except for a brief inaugural ceremony on Aug. 9, dropped from public view.

He underwent quintuple-bypass surgery to unclog his coronary arteries, spent a month in a sanitarium and from there moved to a government dacha, then to the hunting lodge.

Aides say he has been working a few hours a day, watching movies, taking long walks and sitting in the sauna.

Dr. Michael DeBakey, the American pioneer heart surgeon who advised Yeltsin’s doctors, said Friday that tests since the operation show a marked improvement in the president’s heart function.

“I expect him to be able to function normally now,” DeBakey said of Yeltsin in a telephone interview from Houston.

DeBakey said he wrote to Yeltsin this month saying the Russian leader can expect “to lead a reasonably normal life for the next 10 years” provided he sticks to a well-balanced diet and a “reasonable” work schedule.

With that advice in mind, presidential spokesman Sergei V. Yastrzhembsky said Yeltsin will begin a “staged, gentle resumption of work in order not to overload himself” and will make no “radical decisions” for at least a few days.