MOSCOW — President Boris N. Yeltsin appointed a former Soviet bureaucrat, once charged with bribery, to be his new finance minister Friday, a move that startled economic reformers and prompted one of them, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander N. Shokhin, to announce his resignation.
The appointment of Vladimir Panskov, 50, to head the Finance Ministry and other recent Cabinet shifts have created an air of uncertainty about Yeltsin's reform program. The three senior economic officials with whom the West had been dealing have all been fired or left the government.
