Russian Regions Wary as Putin Tightens Control

Kazan, Russia -- The last time this city's white-walled fortress fell to Moscow was in 1552, when Ivan the Terrible defeated the powerful Tatar khanate of Kazan. Now Tatarstan -- one of the 89 regions in Russia's awkward and disjointed federation -- is under siege again, this time by Vladimir V. Putin.

Mr. Putin, the acting president and the clear favorite in the March 26 presidential election, keeps hammering away at variations of a single theme: the urgent need to restore the authority of a strong central government in Russia and bring its far-flung, free-wheeling regions to heel.

The message has not been lost here and in other regional capitals where, for the last 10 years, local leaders have grown used to doing things their own way, sometimes with the consent of Moscow, sometimes without. Except for Chechnya, the southern republic now flattened by war, no other region has pulled harder at Moscow's leash than Tatarstan.

In 1990 -- even before Boris N. Yeltsin, campaigning to become Russia's first president, urged the regions to assume as much sovereignty as they could "swallow" -- Tatarstan, with its majority Muslim Tatars, was already leading the pack. It declared sovereignty, laid claim to the considerable oil wealth beneath its soil and draped itself in all the trappings of statehood, from flag to hymn to its own national day.

And like many of Russia's other 89 regions, Tatarstan has often set itself above Russian law. Going beyond its prerogatives under Russia's tax code, the republic has added taxes of its own, to the fury of local businesses. It has imposed restrictions on foodstuffs crossing its borders into neighboring regions. Its election laws and practices make a mockery of democracy, according to a lawsuit brought by a local journalist after a close analysis of a series of strangely skewed election results.

But most of all, many residents complain that they are living not in a modern state but in a feudal society in which the ruling clan, led by President Mintimer Shaimiyev, has a lock not only on government, but on an economy that somehow missed the boat when Russia went headlong into a free market.

Mr. Putin has vowed to put a stop to such freelance federalism. Speaking last month to law students in Siberia, he called for a return to longstanding Russian traditions. "Russia was created as a centralized state, and it has existed exactly this way," he said. "Thus, we had czarism, then Communism, and now the president has appeared, the institution of the presidency."

Mr. Shaimiyev, a wily realist and above all a survivor, has taken the hint and is careful not to disagree with Mr. Putin. But he says he wants to be sure that Mr. Putin's strong state does not exclude the political process, with its usual give and take.

"What does strong authority mean in the conditions of democratic development of the country and the market economy," Mr. Shaimiyev asked in a recent interview. "If it means observance of people's rights and freedoms and guarantee of civil ownership, then I agree we need strong authority. But if it is seen as giving orders from the top, well, that is utopia, and then there is no further need for reform in Russia."

Mr. Shaimiyev has been at his job for 12 years. In that time, he has managed to ride out every one of Russia's crises, including those -- like the 1991 Communist-backed coup and the recent ill-fated opposition party led by former Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov -- in which he backed the losing side.

In the parliamentary elections last December, Tatarstan voters, loyally following their leader's advice, backed Mr. Primakov's party. On March 26, Mr. Shaimiyev predicts, they will follow him just as loyally onto the Putin bandwagon, which he joined with unabashed alacrity once it became apparent that the acting president was a sure winner.

Much has changed in Russia since last fall, when Mr. Shaimiyev and other regional bosses were able to throw their weight around and dictate the terms of their support. "Now, the issue is not how much regional leaders will be able to get from the center, but about how much they can avoid losing," said Nikolai Petrov, an analyst at the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"Regional leaders are very afraid of Putin," said Yelena Mizulina, a parliamentary deputy from the ancient Russian city of Yaroslavl. "He will pressure them -- and that is a good thing for Russia -- but the key test will be how he does it."

Mr. Putin has already begun to tighten control. Moving quickly after Mr. Yeltsin's sudden resignation on Dec. 31, he has replaced about one-fourth of the presidential representatives in the regions -- officials assigned to enforce federal authority but who, in reality, were often beholden to regional leaders during the Yeltsin era. In at least two cases, Mr. Putin's appointees were former chiefs of the local FSB, the security service that he once headed.

Few people dispute the need to tidy up the relationship between Russia's regions and the central government, to bring local laws into conformity with federal laws. And most agree that these issues would have come to a head this year, regardless of who succeeded Mr. Yeltsin.

"I can say for certain that no unified system of power exists in Russia today," Yegor Stroyev, chairman of the upper chamber of Parliament, where regional leaders have ex officio seats, said in a recent interview with the newspaper Izvestia. "All there is the framework of power."

After the election, Mr. Putin may take even bolder steps. Plans now being floated by his supporters include a proposal to group the regions in larger, more manageable super-provinces -- perhaps corresponding to eight existing interregional associations or to the "guberniye" that existed in czarist times. Another proposal calls for Moscow to appoint most regional governors, rather than have them elected locally, with the exception of some sensitive regions, like the two metropolises of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the so-called national republics, like Tatarstan, that are home to non-Russian ethnic groups.

Such changes would require constitutional amendments and a political consensus that is lacking. Few expect Mr. Putin to start a costly and even dangerous political clash with regional leaders any time soon. But some analysts note that these proposals give a sense of the direction of Mr. Putin's own thinking about the future shape of Russia.

Here in Tatarstan, President Shaimiyev presides like a latter-day khan, ruling from a sumptuously renovated palace inside the local Kremlin's walled enclave, hard by a giant new mosque that rivals the largest of Kazan's Orthodox churches.

As leader of this republic of 3.7 million, most of them, like himself, Muslim Tatars, Mr. Shaimiyev's rule is unchallenged, although not as ham-handed as the president of neighboring Bashkortostan, who routinely oversteps basic democratic norms.

In Tatarstan, the state council, or legislature, is firmly in the president's pocket, with two-thirds of its seats filled with his appointees, from local administration heads to the prime minister to directors of state-owned factories.

The local economy looks much like it did in Soviet times. Tatneft, the local oil company that is the source of much of the republic's wealth, is publicly traded, but firmly under the regional government's control, as are all its major petrochemical factories.

In much of this, the Shaimiyev family has kept a hand, giving rise to a local joke that Tatarstan's democracy is guaranteed by the fact that the president has two sons.

Mr. Shaimiyev, who has both the easy charm and political acuity of the boss of a big-city political machine, makes no apologies for having taken Mr. Yeltsin at his word on the offer of unlimited sovereignty, even when it meant flouting the Russian Constitution.

Back then, he noted, Tatarstan was seething with Tatar nationalist sentiment. Later, when the Chechnya pursued an outright separatist course, many were to praise both Mr. Yeltsin and Mr. Shaimiyev for having found a viable -- if messy -- political solution.

"We both, Yeltsin and I, knew about the discrepancies in the laws," Mr. Shaimiyev said. "But such was life back then. We had to calm the people down; the people of Tatarstan were demanding independence. Yelt sin could see it with his own eyes."

At every step, Tatarstan took the lead in stretching, straining and twisting Russia's federal relationships. Its unilateral declaration of sovereignty was issued one year before Mr. Yeltsin uttered his famous phrase. In 1994, it was the first of Russia's regions to negotiate a bilateral treaty with Moscow, which, in time, became the model for some 40 such treaties signed by other Russian regions.

Now, with a new era dawning, Tatarstan is likely to have to roll back its claims to sovereignty, said Lev Ovrutsky, a journalist based in Kazan.

"From the beginning, Tatarstan was the pioneer," he said. "It was the first to get results with its declaration of sovereignty, and now it will be the first to make corrections."

As the rumblings from Moscow become more distinct, people here are divided about what Mr. Putin's ''strong state" will mean to them. For five years, Tatarstan has been able to keep half of its federal tax revenues, an arrangement heavily criticized in Moscow but widely applauded here, where the standard of living is among the highest in Russia.

Many Tatars, who take pride in their republic's quasi-sovereign status, fear that Mr. Putin's strong words will usher in a new era of Russian chauvinism.

"The new political regime in Moscow will be extremely authoritarian, and it will lead to a taking away of the rights that have been won by Tatarstan," said Damir Iskhakov, a historian and founding member of the Tatarstan Social Center, which played a key role in the Tatar nationalist movement of the early 1990's.

But paradoxically, Mr. Iskhakov said, some Tatar nationalists support a greater role for the federal government on the theory that it will be less selfish, and less narrow in its distribution of power and resources than the current local elite.

Many local entrepreneurs, both Russian and Tatar, are also looking to the federal government to loosen the stranglehold on private business now held by regional leaders.

"The local authorities want money, but mostly they want to control things," said Valery Khubulav, executive director of Zarya Confectionary, a privatized company.

Andrei Tatyanchikov, a businessman and leader of the local branch of the Union of Right Forces, a party of free-market advocates, recently founded a club of like-minded young entrepreneurs who want to see change come to Tatarstan.

"We are not looking for another revolution, '' Mr. Tatyanchikov said. "What we want is for the government to follow the law. We want an even playing field, with one set of rules. We have already gone through a series of crises -- high inflation, high interest rates, the crash of the ruble -- and we adjusted to all of it. Now we are tired, and we want this craziness to end."