President Boris Yeltsin said Thursday that "urgent measures" are needed to bolster his fledgling free-market economic reforms, including more protection for the poor.
In a speech to the Russian legislature, Yeltsin also reported on his recent foreign trips, saying the United States is "deeply interested" in backing his economic program and U.S. businesses are ready for large-scale cooperation with Russia."Now the need for a series of urgent measures to galvanize our economic policy has become clear," Yeltsin told lawmakers. The new steps are needed because "life is constantly changing, and so they are natural and even inevitable."
He said new proposals to reform agriculture and provide more protection for the poor were being drawn up. Last week, newspapers reported that the government was planning to pay pensioners and low-income Russians an additional 200 rubles every three months. In addition, they said Yeltsin would raise pensions for those over 80 and to all World War II veterans.
Low-income Russians have been hit hardest by the reforms introduced Jan. 2, which raised prices an average of 200 percent to 300 percent. Moscow Deputy Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said last week that 95 percent of the capital's residents now live below the poverty line.
Yeltsin told the lawmakers that Russian government officials were meeting Thursday to assess the first six weeks of his reform program, and he would address the nation Wednesday about the meeting's outcome.
The failure of his reforms would bring a new wave of "instability . . . conflicts and an arms race," he warned, and the West has come to appreciate this.
"It is particularly important that the West's widespread opposition to long-term cooperation and . . . actions to support the reforms has begun to be overcome," he said. "Our position - that reform in Russia is not only a domestic matter of our own but also a weighty component in the construction of a new worldorder - was widely recognized."
Yeltsin said he established "close personal contacts" with President Bush.
"Russia and the United States no longer regard each other as potential adversaries," he said. "This completely changes the whole image of the contemporary world."
Answering questions later from lawmakers, Yeltsin also said he met for two hours Wednesday with his estranged vice president, Alexander Rutskoi, and had put him in charge of agricultural reform.
Rutskoi would be "kept busy" by this work, Yeltsin said, drawing laughter from the delegates.
Rutskoi has emerged as Yeltsin's chief critic.
The decorated Afghan war hero has repeatedly spoken out against Yeltsin's market reforms, particularly the lifting of price controls.
He turned up the volume last weekend by calling for a state of emergency to prevent "anarchy," and was quoted Thursday in Nezavisimaya Gazeta (The Independent Newspaper) as saying Yeltsin's reforms had created a "state of lawlessness, a dictatorship of new businessmen and sometimes the dictatorship of the street."
Yeltsin told the lawmakers that Russia's commitment to democracy and a free market economy and the "abandonment of totalitarian illusions" made the new spirit of cooperation possible with the West.