— CABINET:

Prime Minister Primakov named three additional cabinet members. Vadim Gustov will be a first deputy prime minister with responsibility for regional policy. Gustov, a former governor of Leningrad Oblast, is said to favor merging Russia’s eighty-nine sub-federal administrative units into eight or nine super-regions, to gain efficiency and sublimate separatist tendencies…. Gennady Kulik, a Duma member from the pro-communist Agrarian Party, is to be deputy prime minister for agriculture. Kulik had been a minister of agriculture in the Soviet government of Mikhail Gorbachev. He takes office as the country faces the worst grain harvest in forty years…. Surprisingly, Primakov asked Finance Minister Mikhail Zadornov to stay on. Zadornov, once a member of reform economist Grigory Yavlinsky’s Yabloko faction in the Duma, left that group when he joined what was then Viktor Chernomyrdin’s government in November 1997. Aleksandr Shokhin, the two-week wonder Deputy Prime Minister for negotiations with Western creditors, cited the invitation to Zadornov as a reason for his own resignation. He could not serve, he said, with someone who had taken part in the “dishonest” and inept August 17 devaluation and default.