Putin urges changes to centralize power

MOSCOW -- Facing a wave of deadly terrorism, President Vladimir Putin moved yesterday to reshape Russia's political system and give the central government dramatically increased powers, but his critics said the changes would threaten the country's young democracy and put it on a path toward dictatorship.

Putin said in a televised speech before top officials that remodeling Russia's governing bodies is essential to strengthen the country's institutions and avoid a repetition of the bloody hostage-taking raid at a school this month.

Putin called for measures limiting the role of smaller opposition political parties, barring independent politicians from running for the national legislature, and effectively giving the president the power to appoint regional governors who are now elected. The changes are likely to be approved before the end of the year by Kremlin loyalists who control Russia's Parliament.

Opposition leaders and some political analysts responded that the changes would do little or nothing to stop terrorism, and they accused Putin of using the Beslan school raid that killed more than 330 people, half of them children, as a pretext for gaining full control over Russia's political institutions.

Putin told the meeting of Cabinet ministers, Kremlin staff, security service chiefs, and regional leaders that ''one cannot talk and cannot even think about what happened in Beslan without tears."

''But mere compassion, tears, and words of support from the authorities are not enough," he said. ''We need to act, to raise the effectiveness of governing bodies in solving the whole compound of tasks facing the country."

Putin's political critics and some independent analysts said the changes could prove disastrous for Russia by reducing credible opposition to the president's policies.

The proposals are ''unconstitutional and dangerous," prominent liberal Sergei Mitrokhin said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies. ''His initiative shows that the president has no adequate idea about how to fight terrorism."

Independent political analyst Georgy Satarov said that Putin ''meant that the country needs more dictatorship." Nationalist lawmaker Sergei Glazyev said, ''Putin's political reform looks like an incongruous anachronism that sets us several decades back."

Putin said he wanted the State Duma, or the lower house of Parliament, to be elected solely on a proportional party-list basis. Only parties that get 7 percent of the vote or more would get into Parliament, and the number of seats would be based on each party's total vote. That would probably block most Kremlin critics, such as independent politicians or representatives of smaller political parties, from gaining Parliament seats. Under the current law, half of the seats in the lower chamber are filled through individual races.

Putin said his goal was to consolidate the political system, in part by strengthening national political parties.

''One of the mechanisms ensuring real dialogue and cooperation between society and authorities in the battle against terrorism would be major national parties," Putin said. ''In the interests of strengthening the national political system, I deem it necessary to introduce a proportional system of elections to the State Duma."

Putin said he also wanted to eliminate the system under which Russian people or parties nominate regional governors and elect them by popular vote. Instead, governors would be nominated by the president and confirmed by local legislatures, which have been largely reduced to rubber-stamping bodies during Putin's tenure.

Since Putin's predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, replaced the appointment of regional governors from Moscow with an election system, many Kremlin opponents have won the jobs. In one of his first moves as president 4 years ago, Putin sharply curtailed governors' powers and dismissed them from the upper chamber of the national Parliament. But regional leaders have preserved considerable influence in their constituencies.

''The top positions in a number of Russian regions were gained by people whom the Kremlin clearly didn't want to see in those jobs," independent political analyst Vyacheslav Nikonov told Ekho Moskvy radio. ''And now, in the light of recent terrorist attacks, the strengthening of governing bodies . . . has become a favorite topic among top Russian leaders."

While Putin's planned changes aren't completely unexpected, they ''have to be called revolutionary," Nikonov said.

Putin said his orders were prompted by the need to consolidate the executive branch to make it more efficient in combating terrorism -- an explanation that even drew criticism from some of his usual allies.

The overhaul of the gubernatorial election system would ''lead to a lowering of the local leaders' authority and also to a serious lowering of political pluralism in the country," Kremlin-linked political analyst Sergei Markov told Ekho Moskvy radio.

Russia has suffered a deadly spate of attacks in recent weeks, all attributed to separatist rebels from Chechnya. The week before the Beslan raid, nearly simultaneous explosions aboard two Russian passenger jets claimed 90 lives. A day before those attacks, a suicide bombing in Moscow killed another 10 people. Those attacks appear to have galvanized many Russians to support Putin's call for a harsh response to terror.

Over the past week, government-linked trade unions organized an antiterrorism rally that drew 130,000 people in Moscow, and national television networks -- all of which have been taken over by the state during Putin's tenure -- aired reports about scores of Russians rushing to hospitals to donate blood for the hundreds of wounded in Beslan. The wounded ''are confidently headed toward getting well," a Russian television correspondent declared in an upbeat report Sunday that drew heavily on Soviet-era cliches.

Critics said that Putin's changes would stoke dissent by taking some democratic rights away from the people, including the right to elect governors.

''The Kremlin's authority will be strengthened, but the country will be weakened," Vladimir Ruzhkov, one of the few opposition lawmakers, told Ekho Moskvy.

The next Parliament ''will consist of puppet parties and won't have any authority," he said.

Independent political analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky said that Putin's antiterrorism rhetoric amounted to ''nothing but words," while the changes are aimed at suppressing the Kremlin's opponents ''so they don't interfere, don't get in the way of a transition to a clearly authoritarian regime."

While moving to restrict electoral rights, Putin said he wanted Russians ''to be sure that their opinions will be heard." He called for creating a Public Chamber to give nongovernment groups a voice in the fight against terrorism and some control over security services.

Given Putin's accusation this spring that Russian nongovernmental organizations serve ''dubious" interests, analysts said they doubted that groups that have been critical of the Kremlin will be allowed to join the chamber.

''Either this chamber will be made up of people controlled by the presidential administration, or, if respectable activists are allowed in, the chamber will have no real powers," Pribylovsky said.

Putin, who was reelected to a second term this spring with more than 70 percent of the vote, expressed confidence that he had public support for the changes, declaring, ''I am convinced that unity in the country is the main condition for defeating terrorism."