No one is yet "dizzy" with the success of the government's anti-corruption drive, but important steps have been taken nevertheless, President Dmitry Medvedev said Tuesday at a meeting with Communist deputies.

"In regards to the fight against corruption, we are clearly at the very, very beginning of the road," Medvedev said. "Nobody is dizzy with success. There is actually no success so far."

However, "the legal basis for anti-corruption efforts has been created," and "it is critically important now that this should start working," Medvedev said.

Russia perennially places at the bottom of corruption rankings. In a 2008 ranking by watchdog Transparency International, it slipped from 120th to 143rd place out of a total of 163 countries.

Medvedev has promised to make stamping out corruption a priority of his presidency, introducing a number of bills to the State Duma late last year. In March, he submitted a public declaration of his personal income and property as well as those of his family members, leading other top government officials to follow suit.

At Tuesday's meeting, where he touched on a wide range of subjects, Medvedev warned state corporations that they would be held accountable if they "gorged" themselves on government funds.

"If [corporations] receive cash, they should spend it effectively," he said. "If somebody has gorged themselves, then let them return the money."

The comments are the second instance in less than a week in which the president has rapped state corporations. Last Friday, he called the State Nanotechnology Corporation, or Rusnano, a company with "a lot of money" that "still has to understand how to correctly spend it."

He also told Communist deputies that the country's agricultural sector was in a "very difficult" situation because of competition with European farms and large state subsidies to farmers in some of the EU countries.

"The state subsidies that are in place in some countries, primarily those of the European Union, prevent our agricultural producers from competing with them in a normal way not only in foreign markets, but in the domestic market as well," Medvedev said.