President Yeltsin left hospital for three hours yesterday to sack a leading aide and to announce a corruption crackdown before returning to his sickbed to complete his convalescence from what has been described as pneumonia.
The ailing Russian leader made a brief visit to the Kremlin to sack his influential chief of staff, Mr Valentin Yumashev, and his staff, and to promote Russia's security chief to the top job in the Kremlin administration.
Mr Yeltsin then returned to the hospital where he has spent the past two weeks struggling to shake off the lung problems which have dogged him repeatedly in the past two years.
"Doctors asked him to continue his treatment so he returned to hospital," the Kremlin spokesman, Mr Dmitry Yakushkin, said.
Mr Yakushkin said the President decided to sweep out his old team because he was unhappy with the slack manner in which Mr Yumashev had fought graft, political extremism and separatism, all of which have surfaced menacingly in Russia in recent months.
The Kremlin has been seriously weakened by the physical frailty of its leader, who has been forced to yield authority to the government. It has also failed to head off political extremism and regional separatism which both pose a threat to the patchwork Russian Federation.
A furious row over anti-Semitic outbursts by one parliamentarian and the shocking, cynical slaughter of a human rights champion have accentuated the sense of drift and impotence in the seat of Russian power.
Mr Yeltsin's opponents have called for his resignation, and an impeachment process inched forward yesterday as deputies formally laid another charge at Mr Yeltsin's door - that of "destruction of the armed forces".
In the face of such political fury and economic woe, yesterday's manoeuvres were aimed at consolidating power around the state security supremo, Mr Nikolai Bordyuzha, who takes over from Mr Yumashev as Kremlin chief of staff. Mr Yakushkin said that the new administration chief would concentrate on rooting out corruption in the corridors of power. As Security Council chairman, Mr Bordyuzha will be able to call on powerful allies to take "appropriate measures", he added.
In his flurry of decrees yesterday, Mr Yeltsin also took control over the justice and tax portfolios, adding them to the 13 other ministries and agencies which already report directly to the Kremlin.
Analysts noted that Mr Yumashev had virtually disappeared from the political scene in recent weeks, and that not even his reported close ties to Mr Yeltsin's younger daughter and image-maker, Ms Tatyana Dyach enko, could save him as he had overstepped his brief.
Mr Yumashev was joined in the Kremlin's revolving doors by his deputies, Mr Mikhail Komissar, Mr Yevgeny Savostyanov and Mr Yury Yarov, although Mr Yarov was appointed as the President's representative to the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament. --(Reuters)
The centre-right Yabloko party scored strongly in local elections in St Petersburg after a heavy voter turnout despite a scandal-ridden campaign, firstround results showed yesterday. The Communists, the largest party nationwide, were well behind in second place.
Mr Alexander Shishlov, a Yabloko deputy to the State Duma, the lower house of the national parliament in Moscow, said the results showed that sympathies in liberal St Petersburg "remain on the side of the democratic forces".
Yabloko, led nationally by the likely Russian presidential contender Mr Grigory Yavlinsky, will probably account for 23 or 24 of the 88 candidates who go through to a run-off on December 20th, while Communists and their allies will probably account for 11, with most of the rest independents, a party spokesmen said.