President Boris Yeltsin declared Tuesday that Russia should ban the use of foreign currency on its soil.


"The ruble must be the exclusive means of purchase in Russia", Yeltsin said in a speech to parliament designed to assuage growing public dissatisfaction with the course of economic reform.


He said that exporters and foreigners doing business in Russia would have to convert all of their hard-currency earnings into rubles at currency exchanges.


If enacted into law, Yeltsin's proposal would severely effect joint ventures, travel companies and hard-currency shops that cater to foreigners and Russia's the wealthy for dollars or Deutsche marks. They would in future have to trade in rubles.


The decision is aimed primarily at mafiosi and black-marketeers who live by a parallel dollar economy. To crack down on crime and corruption, Yeltsin said he had on Monday formed a four man crime-busting team headed by Vice President Alexander Rutskoi.


The proposal to ban hard currency would also aim to shore up the ruble, which plunged a further 10 percent to 342 rubles to the dollar on Tuesday .


Yeltsin topped a five-point plan for the economy with a drive to control inflation. Under point two, restructuring the economy, he proposed tax breaks for companies that reinvest profits or increase their sales volume in real terms.


Points three to five of the plan covered privatization, land reform and a


crackdown on monopolies, respectively.


This was Yeltsin's first appearance before the legislature since April, when he attacked parliament for opposing reform. On Tuesday, while he did not announce any U-turns in the reforms of acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar, the tone of Russia's first president had changed dramatically.


The speech clearly was addressed to meet the concerns of Russia's emergent centrist opposition, which believes the government is not doing enough to secure jobs and living standards in Russia, and too little to protect the interests of Russians in the former Soviet republics.


"Russians outside Russia should rest assured that the motherland has not forgotten them and will help them", the president said, addressing 'fears that Russians who now find themselves beyond Russia's borders, especially the army, have been abandoned either to racism, as in the Baltic states, or to civil war, as in Tajikistan and the Caucasus.


Yeltsin said that four battalions of reinforcements were being sent to Tajikistan to form an escape corridor for Russia's 201st division that has been trapped by the fighting there.


On the domestic front, Yeltsin did not abandon Gaidar. But he doled out as much criticism to the Gaidar government as to opponents of reform, maintaining a presidential distance from the fray.


Yeltsin said that Gaidar's team should not resign and that, given the circumstances, "any other government would have managed reforms even worse".


But it was faint praise and Yeltsin followed it up by asking for significant "corrections" in Gaidar's economic reform policies. He said that the government's eyes were too much on macroeconomics and not enough on the human costs of reform.


Yeltsin also criticized the government for closing its ears to economic proposals from other parties or factions. He specified Civic Union, which represents the powerful industrialist's lobby among others.


During a break in the session, Yeltsin said he found Civic Union "interesting" and believed that it could form the basis for a two-party system in Russia.


Commenting on two of Gaidar's closest allies, Yeltsin said he was "deeply dissatisfied" with Pyotr Aven, the foreign trade minister, and Andrei Nechayev, the economics minister.


Alexander Titkin, the industry minister whom Yeltsin also attacked, was demoted last week in a government reshuffle. Titkin was one of the more old-style ministers and considered excessively interventionist. Yeltsin told reporters it was possible that all three ministers would be dismissed.


Yeltsin did draw a clear line in the sand on privatization, however, warning that nobody would be allowed to stop the voucher program that was launched on Oct. 1 and is designed to turn Russians into property owners.


After announcing that he had signed a decree allowing people to use the privatization vouchers to buy land, Yeltsin also urged parliament not to "drag out any further passage of the law permitting the purchase and sale of land".


If he made any concession to opponents of mass privatization, it was to correct journalists during the impromptu press conference. "I do not use the word 'vouchers'. I use the Russian word, 'checks'", he said.


Yury Gekht, a member of parliament and head of the Industrial Union, a faction allied to Civic Union, said he found the president's speech promising. He said it was further evidence that Yeltsin had "changed his ideology" over the past month.


Gekht read bad news tor Gaidar in the entrails of Yeltsin's speech.


"The team represented by Gaidar made a speech that was completely the opposite to that of the president", he said. "Clearly this is the first step toward a change in the team".