Russian President Boris Yeltsin officially began his re-election campaign on Thursday with promises of new cash handouts on a visit to a provincial city where his communist rivals are strong.
Yeltsin smiled and looked relaxed as he mingled with crowds in Belgorod, about 370 miles south of Moscow, one day after formally registering as a candidate for the June 16 poll.He promised to compensate investors whose savings have lost their value because of the high inflation that has accompanied Western-style reforms and pledged better grants for students and higher pensions for war veterans.
The president made no mention of an incident on Wednesday in which a sniper fired three shots near his Moscow home. Itar-Tass news agency said a building nearby had been the target, not Yeltsin's home. Nobody was hurt.
"We will compensate investors - let Russians be confident that they will finally get their money back," Yeltsin said.
"The older a person is, the faster the money will be repaid. Younger people will receive it a bit later."
Yeltsin gave no other details of a planned decree outlining the compensation, which could affect millions of people but said he would sign it in about a week.
It was the latest in a series of populist moves intended to head off a strong communist challenge five years after the Soviet Union collapsed. Other decisions have included ordering the government to pay all wage arrears.
Yeltsin's new promises were striking because he made them in a region where the communists won 35 percent of the votes in a parliamentary election last December and the pro-government bloc of Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyr-din won only 6 percent.
Yeltsin, 65, showed no signs of health problems after the two heart attacks he suffered last year as he shook hands with passers-by and talked to people on his way to the city center.
He talked to shoppers, students and war veterans, listened to their problems and explained his policies to them.
"I want to meet Russians and find out how they live in this region," Interfax news agency had quoted Yeltsin as saying as he left for Belgorod, a city of about 350,000 people in an industrial and agricultural area near the border with Ukraine.
Yeltsin said after registering his candidacy in Moscow on Wednesday he was not scared of the election race, although he trails Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov in opinion polls.