President Putin builds momentum
By Dmitry Zaks
MOSCOW (AFP): President Vladimir Putin has turned a blind eye to other criticism to quietly win one of the most important battles in Russia's post-Soviet history -- full Moscow control over the provinces.
Putin's political honeymoon appeared to have come to a crushing end with the arrest and brief imprisonment this month of independent media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky.
A top U.S. business delegation canceled a planned trip to Moscow in protest while 17 of Russia's most influential company chiefs sent a rare letter to the Kremlin questioning whether Putin was building a police state.
The Gusinsky affair grabbed international headlines in part because it appeared to confirm that Putin was resorting to his KGB past by using the security services and prosecutors to silence his more liberal critics.
Yet Putin in the three months since the March 26 election has demonstrated that he is able to pick his battles well.
He treated Gusinsky's arrest in public as an irritating disturbance and swiftly reaffirmed his commitment to an open press.
In the meantime Putin steadily pressed on with his most crucial enterprise to date: convincing lawmakers that it was a good idea to put Russia's regions under full Kremlin control. And he has got off to a fine start.
"The Kremlin is clearly in a hurry to build a new power structure," the Sevodnya newspaper said. "Pace and pressure -- the best methods to forestall possible opposition to government reform."
Putin has in fact won the once decidedly anti-Kremlin State Duma's support for the most radical re-draft of Russia's power structure to date.
Lawmakers on Friday overwhelmingly agreed to strip regional senators of their seats in the Federation Council upper chamber of parliament.
In the coming week they are also expected to pass a bill which would allow Putin to either fire or temporarily dismiss a governor.
"Controlled by the president, the Duma has decided that the Federation Council should be just as obedient," the Nezavisimaya Gazeta said.
The governors will likely try to strike down this legislation but the Duma has demonstrated that it now has enough votes to override that veto and grant Putin his wish of grabbing back regional rights granted by his predecessor Boris Yeltsin.
It is far from clear how Putin will use this new authority and foreign investors, for one, are keen on the idea of the often- messy relations between Moscow and the provinces being ironed out by the president's firm hand.
But what Putin's bid to centralize authority has proven so far is that he does not fear criticism from either the old powerful coterie which surrounded Yeltsin or the powerful regional bosses themselves.
Once-influential tycoon Boris Berezovsky has vehemently attacked Putin's bid to bring the regions to heel. This suggests the old Kremlin guard is steadily losing out to Putin's own Saint Petersburg-based team of former secret service agents.
Meanwhile such old Kremlin favorites as Federation Council chairman Yegor Stroyev have also balked at Putin's plans and warn of a possible return to dictatorship.
However Putin is building a new power base that should shortly limit the authority of influential figures like Stroyev.
He has already grouped Russia's 89-regions into seven super- districts and appointed his own men in charge of each one. Analysts predict that these presidential representatives will eventually oversee the distribution of federal funds to the regions.
According to the Sevodnya daily, at least, the loose federal system that helped keep Russia together during Yeltsin's tumultuous terms in office has already been "buried."