Yeltsin Sacks 3 Members of His Cabinet

Russia’s ever-erratic President Boris N. Yeltsin fired three Cabinet ministers Saturday, making good on a threat issued two days earlier to punish the “culprits” for last year’s lackluster economic performance.

But the 67-year-old head of state explained the firings of the three officials as a “transfer to other positions,” throwing in doubt whether his action was punitive or preparatory to new promotions.

Those fired from the nearly 50-member Cabinet were Transportation Minister Nikolai P. Tsakh, Education Minister Vladimir Kinelyov and the deputy prime minister in charge of relations with other former Soviet republics, Valery Serov.

Yeltsin met with the full Cabinet, which answers to Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, on Thursday and began a long-delayed assessment of 1997 economic performance by announcing there would be three fewer ministers in office by the end of the meeting.

But Yeltsin abruptly left the Kremlin gathering without issuing any reshuffle orders, leaving bemused ministers to carry on without him in evaluating the government’s work.

Russia’s first year of even modest economic growth since the collapse of the Soviet Union was withered to insignificance by the financial turmoil that afflicted Asia late last year and by the Russian government’s failure to collect taxes or operate within budgetary restraints.

A government spokesman, Igor Shabdurasulov, told journalists that the dismissals “cannot but be related” to the criticism issued by Yeltsin at the Kremlin meeting two days earlier.

Decisions on who will replace the three fired ministers, and what work they will next be assigned, might be discussed at a meeting Monday between Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin, the Interfax news agency reported, quoting unnamed “informed sources.”

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Yeltsin has a history of puzzling personnel moves, which analysts say are his strategy for keeping key aides on their toes.

A year ago, he called for a thorough overhaul and streamlining of the populous Cabinet that then included more than 50 ministers, commission chairmen and special advisors.

The make-over brought in influential reformers Anatoly B. Chubais and Boris Y. Nemtsov as first deputy prime ministers, but less than a handful of posts were actually eliminated in that shake-up.

Chubais and Nemtsov had their portfolios trimmed last fall. A bribery scandal had tainted the previously irreproachable Chubais, while Nemtsov had become too vulnerable a target for the opposition by virtue of his designation by Yeltsin as the president’s heir apparent.

But Yeltsin made clear before the Thursday session that he had no intention of firing either of his two top reformers or Chernomyrdin, a Soviet-era bureaucrat who serves as a symbol of continuity as well as the president’s loyal whipping boy.

Yeltsin’s choices for what were probably symbolic firings reflected the policy areas he has already described as being lacking.

Serov has been responsible for the past three years for relations with countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, a post-Soviet alliance that has done little more than create costly new bureaucratic structures. Russia’s extensive railroad system has frequently been criticized for gross inefficiency, explaining Tsakh’s firing, and Kinelyov was probably chosen to take the fall for Russia’s declining academic prowess.