Kremlin prepares to anoint Putin as President

Vladimir Putin will be inaugurated as Russian President in the former throne room of the Kremlin tomorrow amid fears that he will further concentrate power in the presidential administration.

During the ceremony the throne itself will be carefully draped to avoid associations with the Tsar. The organisers of the inauguration have also ruled out using the Palace of Congresses within the Kremlin complex because it is too closely associated with Soviet and Communist Party meetings.

Mr Putin's meteoric rise to power since he was appointed Prime Minister last August, and his lack of clear policies, are raising fears that he will create an authoritarian state, uniting the Kremlin administration with the FSB security service and stifling dissent.

A document, said to be under consideration by the Kremlin and published in the daily Kommersant, proposes the creation of a strong presidential administration. "The intellectual, staff and professional potential which the FSB has at its disposal should be brought in to control the political process," says the report.

A Kremlin spokeswoman denied the document was a blueprint for Mr Putin's administration, and said it was probably one of many discussion papers submitted to Mr Putin's think-tank, the Centre for Strategic Research.

This is almost certainly true since many of the proposals in the document are simply public relations ploys. One idea proposed in the paper is for a newly formed "political directorate", supposedly the centre of all decision-making, to find out when an article is going to be published contrary to the Kremlin's interests. The directorate would then "write and publish a similar article a day earlier with facts presented so that the opposition's article would lose its acuteness". Mr Putin's Kremlin, which contains many skilled and ruthless political operators, is hardly in need of such unsophisticated advice.

Mr Putin's record since he became acting-president at the end of last year in succession to Boris Yeltsin suggests that he will move cautiously. His main achievement has been to persuade the Duma to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and approve the Start-2 nuclear arms reduction treaty with the US. Faced with a more hostile Duma, Mr Yeltsin was unable to get the treaty through.