Moscow - President Yeltsin, showing no trace of his recent illness, sent a warning to radical reformers yesterday with hints of a cabinet reshuffle and made more conciliatory gestures towards the opposition. In a radio address summing up the year, Mr Yeltsin said the radicals had forgotten the needs and feelings of ordinary people in their rush for the market. Mr Yeltsin mentioned no names but his remarks should ring alarm bells in the camp of the beleaguered First Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Anatoly Chubais, a marketeer overseeing economic reforms.
"Today it has become clear for most people there have been few [economic] achievements," the president said. "We will correct mistakes and draw the necessary conclusions," he said, echoing a statement he made when he reshuffled the government in November. Mr Yeltsin continued in language very similar to that used by Mr Chubais's most powerful enemy, the media and business tycoon Mr Boris Berezovsky, who accuses Mr Chubais of "Bolshevik" methods. "[Communist] Party slogans have been replaced by macro-economic ones," Mr Yeltsin said. "They first proclaimed `Privatisation at any cost' and later `Let's squeeze the dollar into a currency corridor'."