NEW CENTRAL BANK CHIEF NAMED.

President Boris Yeltsin has named Sergei Dubinin, 44, to head Russia’s Central Bank. Dubinin is currently a board member of Gazprom, one of Russia’s most influential companies. He was First Deputy Finance Minister in 1993, serving under Boris Fedorov in Yegor Gaidar’s reformist government, and later acting Finance Minister in Viktor Chernomyrdin’s government from January to October 1994. (7)

Dubinin, with his reformist past, is expected to continue the government’s tight money policies which brought down inflation, stabilized the ruble, and won crucial support in the form of loans from the International Monetary Fund. His current affiliation with Gazprom also points to ties with Chernomyrdin. Dubinin’s nomination must be approved by the Duma which may debate his candidacy in the next few days.

The decision, which was announced after Yeltsin’s dismissal of Tatyana Paramonova, suggests that the IMF remains reasonably optimistic that, even under new management, Russia’s Central Bank will continue its efforts to curb the money supply. (The IMF monitors Russia’s economic progress on a monthly basis, a step-by-step vetting that is unusual in IMF practice and which is in itself an expression of wariness concerning the government’s ability to reduce inflation.) Meanwhile, Finance Minister Yevgeny Yasin claimed November 9 that, for the first time since Russia began its economic reforms, the government had managed to break the habitual autumn surge in inflation. The rate of inflation was 4.7 percent in October 1995 compared to 18 percent in January and, "even more important," 15.8 percent in October last year, Yasin boasted. (8)

President And Premier Meet, Kremlin In-Fighting Continues.