Who will the president send?
Today at 11 am Boris Yeltsin will address the Federation Council with his annual message. But today readers of Kommersant can familiarize themselves with some of the main ideas of this document. With details - NATALIA Kommersant-TIMAKOVA.

Amendments to the text of the message were made by the president until the last minute. The 87-page text was signed for circulation only yesterday afternoon (this is a common thing for the president - last year the message was generally printed at night). In addition to conceptual amendments, the structure of sentences and individual words were changed to make them easier for Yeltsin to read. He will appear on the podium wearing glasses, and so that senators and deputies are not surprised by the “new image” of the president, he will be presented in a televised address dedicated to Yugoslavia.
Over the past two weeks, Yevgeny Primakov has also been carefully studying the message. He personally contacted the members of the working group and conveyed his comments to them. As a high-ranking Kremlin source said, the prime minister tried to correct not only the economic part of the message, but also the political one.
Nevertheless, in the first economic part of the message, Primakov will find many unpleasant things for himself. The president did not shift the blame for August 17 only to the “young reformers” and their economic policies, as Primakov would have liked. On the contrary, according to Yeltsin, everything is to blame for the “ugly transitional system, stuck halfway from a planned economy to a market economy.” As for a possible turn back, the head of state is adamant: “Moving further in the direction of reforms and correcting mistakes is our common cause.” Where to move is defined quite clearly: “the government must be guided primarily by the strategic goals outlined in the president’s messages.”

Only one paragraph is devoted to relations with the IMF, but it expresses the main goal of the ongoing negotiations - “the idea expressed by a number of authoritative, including Western, economists about complete or partial write-off of the debts of the former USSR deserves serious attention.”
The second section, devoted to domestic policy, contains those basic principles that the president has already declared more than once. Once again it was stated that the time has not come to revise the Constitution, since the “democratic and humanitarian potential” of the current one has not yet been exhausted. And any attempts to change the existing economic system will be regarded precisely as an encroachment on the Basic Law and an undermining of basic economic freedoms.
The president warns those wishing to take political revenge: “We need patriotic professionals, not ‘professional patriots’.” In the run-up to the elections, the Ministry of Justice is instructed to more actively carry out scheduled checks to ensure compliance of parties’ program documents with the Constitution, up to and including “cancellation of registration for actions provoking national, social and religious extremism.”
Due to the events in Yugoslavia, the third, international section of the message underwent the greatest corrections. “The Yugoslav crisis once again showed the validity of our consistent rejection of NATO expansion to the East... We are not on the road with NATO the aggressor.” It is said much more softly about Russia’s relations with America: “We attach considerable attention to the normalization of Russian-American relations, a return to constructive interaction. This should become the most important factor in world politics in the 21st century.”

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 51 dated March 30, 1999, p. 1

Themes:

Activities of the Federation Council