MOSCOW - Boris Yeltsin, in a rare concession yesterday, acknowledged that a majority of Russians are openly dissatisfied with him as president and said that gives him cause to worry.
Emerging from months of seclusion due to his prolonged illness, Yeltsin criticized his own administration for its inability to pay wages and pensions for months at a time, leaving millions of people destitute and bringing some government operations to a standstill.
"Many Russians are unhappy with the government, and consequently they're unhappy with the president," Yeltsin said. "People are openly speaking of that, and the dissatisfied already constitute the majority. I am worried."
The nonpayment of wages has reached a crisis throughout the country, and daily protests take many forms: demonstrations, labor strikes, hunger strikes and even suicide.
In many regions outside Moscow, power and fuel are in short supply, soldiers don't have enough to eat, teachers faint from hunger in the classroom and scientists warn of nuclear disaster if needed funds are not delivered.
Some factory workers get their wages in the form of unwanted products, like the laborers at the Akhtuba factory in Volgograd who once made high-precision navigational instruments for the military. Unpaid for 13 months, they now are paid in unsold rubber sex toys instead of rubles.
"People are suffering, and we cannot permit that," Yeltsin told Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin in a televised meeting. "You and I are responsible for this matter. I take an equal share of responsibility, for I am the president and certainly I'm responsible for the work of the government."
Yeltsin cited a poll showing that more than 50 percent of Russians are dissatisfied with him. "The main thing, of course, is that the government has been unable to cope with the problem of pensions, wages and other payments," he said.
The session seemed designed to show that Yeltsin, who Sunday declared himself "fully recovered" from his heart bypass operation and a subsequent bout of pneumonia, is back in charge at the Kremlin after being absent for most of the past eight months.
Yeltsin publicly scolded his prime minister for the government's problems and directed him to come up with names of top officials who should be fired. "Maybe some of those who do not do their duties in this government should be replaced," Yeltsin declared.
He made similar pronouncements and issued decrees ordering the payment of back salaries and pensions last year when he was running for re-election and again in the months following his July victory. But because of inefficiency, corruption and public antipathy toward taxes, the government has not been able to collect enough money to keep itself running, satisfy its debts and pay people's wages and pensions.
During the past week, more than 250,000 teachers in more than 6,000 schools were on strike to protest their lack of pay. "There are cases when teachers faint during lessons because of hunger," said Galina Terebilova, a striking teacher from the northern city of Kirovsk. "This is not an exaggeration."
Meantime, the wives of 26 workers who helped clean up after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster were in the eighth day of a hunger strike Monday seeking overdue benefit payments for clean-up workers.
And workers at the huge Chelyabinsk tractor factory in the Ural mountains staged a one-day strike Monday to protest the nonpayment of their wages - which in some cases amount to less than $10 a month. Last fall, the prominent director of a nuclear research facility in Chelyabinsk put a bullet through his head, a suicide reportedly promoted from his despair over the lack of money for his once-esteemed institute.
Because of funding shortages, the Russian Space Agency announced Monday that it has postponed the launch of the first module of the Alpha space station, delaying the joint project with the United States and other nations.
The Russian launch, scheduled for November, is now set for June 1998, because Russia was unable to build its module on time. Further delays, U.S. officials say, could unravel the entire project, which is designed to replace Russia's aging Mir space station.
A poll released Monday by the Independent Public Opinion Fund reported that 36 percent of Russians surveyed believe that this nation's economy has hit bottom, while 49 percent believe that the economy will get worse. Only 6 percent said they believed Russia's worst economic period has passed.
But he offered no new specific reforms or measures to revive South Korea's limping economy.
Facing the challenge of curing what he calls the "Korean disease" of corruption, Kim took sole blame for the damage and outrage prompted by a financial scandal involving almost $6 billion in questionable loans to the Hanbo Iron & Steel Co., South Korea's second largest steel maker, which declared bankruptcy last month.
The scandal had threatened to expose high-level corruption in Kim's administration, as rumors flew that his own close allies- and even his own son- had pressured reluctant bankers to make the astronomical loans to the failing company in return for secret political donations.
But prosecutors virtually wrapped up their investigation this week with the indictment of 10 people- none of them regarded as high-ranking- and cleared the president's son, Kim Hyon Chol, of any wrongdoing.
"The whole country is swept up in the agony and sorrow of the Hanbo scandal," Kim said in his 17-minute nationally televised address, a lifeless presentation that lacked the confidence and determination of his triumphant inaugural speech four years ago. "All blame should be laid on me, on my lack of capability as president.... I am prepared to receive any criticism or denunciation from the people."
Kim, in the address marking the fourth anniversary of his administration, termed suspicions circulating around his son as a "great shame." If any new evidence were to surface to prove the allegations true, Kim said he would make his son bear all legal responsibilities, bar him from further social activities and hinted that he would exile him overseas by not allowing him to "stay near me."
But Kim called on the people to join him in a last-ditch effort to build a "New Korea," the phrase he introduced in his inaugural address. "We'll turn this crisis into momentum to get rid of the collusion between politics and business circles, and money politics," he said.
Kim's somber address underscored his stunning fall from grace in the four years since he was elected as Korea's first civilian president in more than three decades. After he took office in 1993, he won international acclaim and sky-high public approval ratings by launching an astonishing attack on the entrenched, corrupt interests that had controlled South Korea for decades.
Kim purged the military clique from government, pushed through landmark laws on political reform and financial disclosure, jailed more than 1,000 officials for corruption and even sent two former presidents- Roh Tae Woo and Chun Doo Hwan- to jail for amassing a $653 million slush fund.
Now, however, Kim faces rock-bottom public support, revolt within his own party and a widespread perception that he has whitewashed the Hanbo scandal using a loyal clique of prosecutors who hail from his region of Pusan-Kyongsang.
He also set off national protests and strikes that caused more than $3 billion in economic damage after his ruling New Korea Party rammed through controversial revisions to the labor and national security laws last December.
And his five-year economic plan has not produced the rosy results envisioned. Although Kim has opened numerous markets and slashed some red tape in his "globalization" campaign to boost Korea into the ranks of advanced industrial nations, the economy remains bedeviled with burgeoning trade deficits, rising unemployment and declining competitiveness.