Putin fights dirty with regional power brokers

30 October 2000

30 October 2000

In an angry letter, a frustrated Peter the Great once asked one of his regional governors: "What have you done with the money? And why is it that dealing with you is like negotiating with the king of a foreign country?"

Three hundred years later, President Vladimir Putin is putting the same questions to the governors and local leaders of the 89 regions into which Russia is divided. He is discovering, as have so many previous rulers of the country, that the man in the Kremlin often reigns rather than rules and real power is in the hands of local despots.

Yevgeny Melnichenko, a political scientist at the Volgograd Academy for Public Service, told me: "It is like the feudal system in the Middle Ages when everybody had a big boss in his own region. If you are involved in business here you have to have a patron."

This is not the view of academics alone. I asked Misha, a former leading light of the criminal underworld in Yaroslavl, a city 600 miles north of Moscow, how he rated the local governor. He said: "He is like a duke from long ago. You can't do anything without him."

It is these reigning dukes that Mr Putin is trying to curb. He has appointed seven envoys or "super-governors" to re-establish the power of the central government across Russia. He is ending the automatic right of governors to sit in the upper house of the Duma.

He is trying to limit their right to levy taxes. In theory it should be easy. The governors usually depend on federal funds. They are often disliked in their own regions. Furthermore, some 40 regional leaders, half the total, are standing for re-election this autumn. Mr Putin is still popular among voters for promising to restore the power of the state.

In this struggle, no blow is considered too low. In the Kursk region south of Moscow, Alexander Rutskoi, the governor and a former vice -president of Russia who helped defend parliament against President Boris Yeltsin in 1993, found his name removed from the ballot less than 24 hours before polling day.

His crime was that he had not listed his ownership of a six-year-old Volga car, which he says he sold some years ago, when he filed as a candidate. The Kremlin says it had nothing to do with his removal, but this is unlikely given the timing of the ruling which gave Mr Rutskoi no time to appeal.

The political execution of Mr Rutskoi shows that the Kremlin, if anybody had any doubts, is prepared to fight dirty in getting rid of regional leaders it dislikes. The problem is that it does not have anyone of real authority to put in their place. Most of Mr Putin's envoys are former security men or military officers without local standing.

The success of Mr Putin in exerting authority through his special envoys or getting governors of his choice elected varies from region to region. In the far east, his envoy did not even succeed in finding office accommodation. Every time he sent people to look at a possible site, the local governor sealed it off with guards. Another local leader said that if any federal official was appointed without his say-so, he would simply "cut off his telephone".

The prize for the most imaginative act of local sabotage of an incoming federal official goes to Yekaterinburg, the largest city in the Urals. Here Mr Putin appointed Petr Latyshev as his special envoy. The local authorities allocated him a large, beautiful 19th-century palace as his headquarters.

This, as Mr Latyshev should have realised, was a trap. The mansion had long been used by school children as a House of Creative Activity. No sooner was it announced that Mr Putin's envoy was going to move in than weeping mothers and distressed children picketed his future residence. Whenever he gave a press conference the first question was, invariably: "Don't you like children, Mr Latyshev?"