MOSCOW – Sounding at times like a mayor promising to fix potholes, President Vladimir V. Putin used his annual national call-in show Thursday to try to reassure Russians that the country’s economic troubles were under control and that he shared their concerns on pocketbook issues.

If his marathon session in 2014 trumpeted the annexation of Crimea and issues of national pride, this year Putin fielded questions from across Russia on issues like dairy cow production, small-business loans and the rising price of car insurance.

Putin tried to paint an overall rosy picture of the economy, noting that the ruble had stabilized and strengthened even if inflation was more than 11 percent.

“Experts see that we have passed the peak of the problems,” he said. “Nothing burst and everything works.”

Putin promised to help dairy farmers get better distribution and prices for their milk; told unpaid workers at the new national space launch center that they would receive back pay; and vowed not to lower public wages nationally even if his economic advisers pressed.

Putin evoked the hated 1990s government economists who, in the view of many Russians, tried to kill off the Communist system with capitalist shock therapy that ushered in a decade of instability and poverty.

Russians revile them, and Putin’s popularity in his third term as president rests in no small part on the fact that until last fall, the economy was stable and wages increased steadily along with the price of oil for much of the past 15 years.

“In order to build up economic policy competently, of course, you need a brain,” Putin said. “But if we want people to trust us, we also need a heart and need to feel how an ordinary man lives.”