Russia Government Officials

Acting Russian President Vladimir V. Putin said Tuesday that he tried to persuade Boris N. Yeltsin not to resign when the president confided two weeks ago that he planned to quit. But according to Putin, Yeltsin had already made up his mind and insisted that his 47-year-old prime minister tell him immediately whether he would accept the post of acting president, as provided by the constitution. "You had enough time to think about it in the past," he recalled Yeltsin saying. "Please, answer now."

Acting Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, looking every bit the presidential candidate, spent his first full day on the job Saturday demonstrating how tough he will be to beat in an early election set for March. While his potential rivals were still recovering from their New Year's hangovers and the shock of former President Boris N. Yeltsin's sudden resignation a day earlier, Putin took a campaign-style tour of war-torn Chechnya.

As surprised as anyone by the resignation of Boris N. Yeltsin, President Clinton and his closest foreign policy advisors Friday praised the departing Russian president and stressed that continuity is key in the sudden ascendancy of his handpicked successor, Vladimir V. Putin. But some officials admitted that managing U.S.-Russian relations in the Putin era will be tricky. After talking by telephone with Russian Foreign Minister Igor S.

Today I am turning to you for the last time with New Year's greetings. But that's not all. Today I am turning to you for the last time as president of Russia. . . . I have understood that it was necessary for me to do this. Russia must enter the new millennium with new politicians, with new faces, with new, smart, strong, energetic people. And we who have been in power for many years already, we must go. . . . I want to ask for your forgiveness.

Boris N. Yeltsin was Russia's first democratically elected president. That much is indisputable. Under his leadership, communism was dismantled and the country set out to build a new economic and political system. That is also indisputable. But Russia's future remains cloudy, and so does Yeltsin's legacy. Since earning reelection in 1996, Yeltsin has been obsessed with how he will go down in history.

The snow fell softly all day in Moscow. It fell on Boris Yeltsin as he left the Kremlin as an ordinary citizen. It fell on shoppers slipping through the slushy streets searching for last-minute holiday gifts. And it fell on 10-year-old Katya Keymakh as she twirled boldly if unevenly on the ice at a central Moscow skating pond, watched proudly by her videotaping father, Vladimir. "It was time for Yeltsin to go," the 36-year-old said, brushing the snow from his lens.

Praising Boris N. Yeltsin for helping to steer his country from communism to democracy, foreign leaders also expressed hope Friday that a new leader may improve Russia's ailing economy and its strained relations with the West. "Boris Yeltsin has played a crucial role in the history of Russia," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a statement released through his Downing Street office. "He has steered his country through a most difficult and painful transition. . . .

Apologizing for his failure to lead Russia into a prosperous future, President Boris N. Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned Friday and handed power to Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, who immediately took over as acting president. Yeltsin, 68, Russia's first democratically elected president and its leader throughout the post-Soviet era, told the nation that the time had come for a younger generation to tackle Russia's formidable economic and social problems.

A former Russian diplomat has been sentenced to 12 years in a penal colony after being found guilty of spying for South Korea, the Federal Security Service said Thursday. Valentin Moiseyev had served as deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's First Asian Department. The department deals with North and South Korea, as well as with China and Mongolia. Moiseyev was convicted of providing Russian state secrets to the South Korean intelligence service, the Interfax news agency said.

Reversing a decision by local election officials, the Russian Supreme Court ruled Monday that reputed organized crime boss Sergei Mikhailov can run for parliament in elections scheduled for Dec. 19. Mikhailov, who spent 26 months in jail in Switzerland awaiting trial on organized crime charges before being acquitted in 1998, had been removed from the ballot on the grounds that he held dual Russian and Greek citizenship.