Feisty Yeltsin Vows Reform, Good Rule and New Cabinet

Back in fighting form after months of illness, President Boris N. Yeltsin celebrated his return Thursday to the hurly-burly of politics with a tough state-of-the-nation speech, promising Russians sweeping economic reforms, honest government and a Cabinet shuffle.

Appearing 17 weeks after heart surgery and eight months since his last major speech, Yeltsin, trim and poised, told parliament in a nationally televised speech that Russia “is still struggling in a flood of problems. . . . We haven’t managed to reach the far bank yet.”

But the 66-year-old president promised that a new surge of economic reform was about to begin, headed by a Cabinet whose remodeling will soon be revealed. To add to the good news, he said Russia’s economy was turning the corner and would grow by 2% this year after contracting for six straight years.

“Enough is enough. The time has come to restore order, and I will do that,” Yeltsin said in a ringing voice.

Yeltsin, who has always preferred the sweeping gesture to niggling details of day-to-day governance, gave no specifics as to how he would fulfill his latest promises--most important, paying the long overdue salaries and pensions of millions of angry Russian workers.

Instead, he tongue-lashed those in his government, blaming others for blocking Russia’s protracted program of economic reform.

He accused unidentified officials in his administration of a multitude of sins, including laziness, corruption, irresponsibility and inefficiency.

“The government is growing fat,” Yeltsin said sternly. “I am not satisfied with the government.”

Presenting himself as the champion of the long-suffering public, protecting Russians from the bureaucrats who had tormented them in his absence, Yeltsin listed the economic and social problems facing this country--inefficient tax collection, corruption and fraud: “People are suffering from delays of wages and pensions, and government efforts have produced no noticeable results. I must say that I’m ashamed that millions of people of the older generation are not receiving pensions.”

A nationwide strike planned for March 27 was “largely justified,” he added, calling it “an alarm signal that people’s patience is at its limits.”

Again appealing to the masses’ discontents, Yeltsin discussed popular gripes, telling voters, among other things, that he favors military reform and that Russia opposes the proposed eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The president’s firm voice, healthy appearance and no-holds-barred grab to get back his vanishing personal popularity were enough to send the Russian stock market up 1% by late afternoon.

His speech also put to rest, at least for now, recent attempts by his political opponents in Russia to change the constitution so legislators, by a vote, could find the president unfit to govern.

Yeltsin, whose term ends in the year 2000, told lawmakers bluntly that he will oppose their efforts to alter the presidency’s constitutional standing.

The 25-minute address was greeted with polite, nervous applause by a parliament largely made up of Yeltsin’s conservative enemies; it also got meek acceptance by Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin’s prime minister for the last four years.

“We deserve such criticism,” Chernomyrdin told a news conference. “The time has come to concentrate on the most essential questions, to change the style of the government’s work, its structure and personal composition.”

He said major Cabinet changes will be announced in days. But he did not confirm suggestions by Kremlin sources that Anatoly B. Chubais, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, will be named deputy prime minister and receive a powerful portfolio to head new economic reforms. Chernomyrdin did strengthen belief in Chubais’ appointment by calling him a “high-caliber economist.”

Giving Chubais, one of the most prominent of an earlier generation of radical market reformers, a new job running economic reform would delight Western governments and investors. It also could help persuade the International Monetary Fund to hand over to Moscow the latest installment of a $10-billion loan.

In the early 1990s, Chubais, a ginger-haired economist, ran Russia’s massive, if flawed, privatization program. It made him popular in the West but earned him great enmity at home, making Chubais an electoral liability for the vote-conscious Yeltsin.

Until it becomes clear who will be in the revamped Russian Cabinet, Western investors have been cautious about praising Yeltsin’s pledges. Some said they were waiting to see whether the president, who has a long record of unkept promises, will now offer actions to match his words.

“He stated a lot of intentions, now there’s the question of whether the Duma [parliament] will deliver,” said Charles Mallory, chief executive of Credit Suisse Investment Funds in Moscow. If Yeltsin “comes through on one or two of these things, it will already be a big step forward.”

Yeltsin’s political enemies were less circumspect.

Communist Party chief Gennady A. Zyuganov, spitting with fury as his hopes of the presidency once again receded into the distance, called Yeltsin’s speech “miserable, helpless buffoonery without any real content behind it.”

“It was another show,” said Zyuganov, runner-up to Yeltsin in July’s presidential election. “It’s nice to hear from the president that things are bad. But who is to blame for the situation when the economy is falling apart and people do not receive their pay?”

But Yeltsin ally Chubais called the presidential address an “unprecedentedly tough assessment of the current situation.”

Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov, one of Yeltsin’s most popular and feared allies, went further, saying the president was now back in the tempestuous form that set him charging down the road toward the Kremlin. “I saw a tough Yeltsin, exactly the man we adored in 1987,” Luzhkov exulted.