President Vladimir Putin is recruiting Russian army generals and secret-service officers for an ambitious campaign to strengthen the Kremlin's power over its shrewdest rivals: the regional bosses who dominate the Russian provinces.
Mr. Putin announced yesterday that he has appointed seven top officials -- including two army commanders, a senior police officer and a former KGB officer -- to supervise Russia's 89 regions.
Under his sweeping new plan, the regions will be monitored by seven large administrative districts, each headed by a powerful Kremlin representative who will oversee all federal agencies and ensure that Moscow's decrees are enforced.
Mr. Putin has also unveiled a controversial plan to weaken the regional barons by removing them from the upper house of parliament and authorizing the Kremlin to sack governors who violate federal laws.
Analysts are calling it the biggest overhaul of Russia's political system since Boris Yeltsin dissolved the Supreme Soviet and introduced a new constitution in 1993.
According to one Moscow newspaper, Mr. Putin threatened to cancel regional elections and appoint the governors himself if they refused to accept his plan.
The scheme is part of the President's larger ambition of establishing a "dictatorship of the law" in Russia. "Above everything else, the state is the law," Mr. Putin said in a televised speech Wednesday night.
"It stands for constitutional law and order and discipline. . . . It would mean that we are living in one strong country, one single state called Russia."
Mr. Putin, elected in a landslide victory in March, is trying to exploit his mass popularity and his dominance of parliament to strengthen the Kremlin's powers in the early days of his term.
He is asking parliament to approve a series of draft laws to weaken the regional chieftains. So far, most parliamentary leaders -- and even some regional bosses -- seem willing to accept the Putin plan. But several governors are strongly opposed.
"The danger is that the new laws can turn into an instrument of political reprisal against dissidents, and become a means of sorting out disobedient governors," said Aman Tuleyev, the popular governor of the Siberian region of Kemerovo.
An official in Tatarstan, one of the most autonomous regions in the country, denounced the plan as "an infringement of the rights of Russia's regions." And the president of the southern Ingushetia region, Ruslan Aushev, condemned it as "an attempt to control everything from Moscow, a return to the doubtful practices of the Communist Party Central Committee."
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of Russia's regional bosses have established nearly dictatorial powers. They control local industries, make all key appointments, issue decrees, and rule their regions like feudal chieftains. While they are subject to elections, many governors are almost unchallenged and have eliminated all serious opposition.
Mr. Yeltsin often attempted to regain control of the regions, but he never succeeded.
Mr. Putin, a retired KGB lieutenant-colonel, has vowed to restore a centralized system of "vertical power" that flows from the Kremlin to regional and local authorities.
"From the very beginning, Russia has been created as a supercentralized state," he said in a book released before the March presidential election. "This is fixed in Russia's genetic code, in its traditions, and in the people's mentality."
In his televised speech this week, Mr. Putin said that 20 per cent of regional laws are in violation of the Russian constitution. "Trade barriers or, even worse, border posts are set up to separate Russia's territories and regions," he said.
He warned of "disastrous consequences," such as Chechnya-style separatist movements, if the regions continue to ignore federal laws.
While analysts agree that the regional bosses are too powerful, they are wary of what seems to be an authoritarian response from the Kremlin. They note that the seven new administrative districts will be based on the same boundaries as Russia's military districts.
"It's part of the tendency toward the militarization of our country," said Andrei Piontkovsky, head of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Moscow.
He also noted the military and security backgrounds of most of the Kremlin's new regional representatives. "Military and security people are getting more and more prominent posts. Putin's authoritarian instincts are evident. It's quite natural for him -- he spent all of his career in the police structures."
The liberal newspaper Sevodnya warned the Kremlin must not try to transform Russia from a federal state into "a single state enterprise, or even worse, a military unit."
In another move yesterday, Mr. Putin reappointed most of his cabinet ministers, including his foreign and defence ministers, but added two young liberals to the finance and economic portfolios.
The new ministers are 40-year-old Alexei Kudrin, who becomes the Finance Minister and one of five deputy prime ministers, and 36-year-old German Gref, who heads an expanded Ministry of Economic Development and Trade.
Geoffrey York