Gaidar spoke as cabinet members met with the enterprise directors in Togliatti, the site of the huge Volga Autoworks plant. Before touring the factory, he told the directors that he would listen to their concerns more carefully in the future and would draft a decree Monday setting up the new council.
Cabinet members made no attempt to hide the reason for the timing of Sunday's meeting.
"We did not come here just to talk about taxes and credits", said First Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Shokhin. "We wanted to see if we had support among the captains of industry, to see if they were independent of their political representatives in parliament and Civic Union".
Shokhin was referring to the powerful centrist bloc that has become a determining force in parliament and whose core support comes from the industrialists lobby.
Speaking to reporters, Pyotr Aven, the foreign economic relations minister, said the timing of Sunday's meeting reflected "the real threat to the government" posed by its critics in the Congress of People's Deputies, Russia's highest legislative body, which is due to convene on Dec. 1.
He admitted however, that the meeting had come "probably a little late".
The visit followed a cabinet meeting Saturday at which Gaidar said President Boris Yeltsin had voiced his commitment to the government.
"The president expressed his confidence in the government", Gaidar told journalists Sunday, predicting that there woul be only "minor changes" in his cabinet.
The government came to Togliatti, the home of Russia's largest car manufacturer, Volga Autoworks, to mollify the industrialists, whom they have been accused of neglecting.
Their criticisms of the Gaidar team have centered on its policy toward large-scale industry. On Sunday, they decried high prices and taxes, the problems of interenterprise debt, the difficulties surrounding privatization and a general lack of attention on the part of the government.
The extent of interenterprise debt was one of the most pressing problems, said Nikolai Abramov, Director of Syntheskauchuk, the world's fifth largest producer of synthetic rubber products. His firm is owed 5. 2 billion rubles, but owes only 3. 2 billion.
"Our money is out there being used, but not by us", he complained.
Yet these criticisms were voiced in a SBrprising atmosphere of support.
"We are for the government and for the transition to a market economy said Abramov. "But the government should listen to the directors and act on our recommendations".
Those included a plea for the government to develop a special approach to the privatization of large enterprises. Anatoly Chubais, the minister in charge of privatization, said that the government was working out a decree on just such special conditions.
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