EUROPE: Putin's man shows freewheeling governor who's boss

It took 10 months for Sergei Kiriyenko, the man President Vladimir Putin gave the job of bringing Russia's regional governors into line, to pay his first official visit to Tatarstan.

The lag showed just how much of a challenge the former prime minister faces in his job, which was designed to implement Mr Putin's tough new regional policy and curb the aspirations of autonomy-seeking governors.

When Mr Kiriyenko eventually went to Kazan, the Tatar capital, last month, he found that even Mintimer Shaimiev, the former Communist party boss turned near-omnipotent regional president, had started to get the message that he had to pledge greater allegiance to the federal centre. "There can't be a strong Tatarstan without a strong Russia, nor a strong Russia without a strong Tatarstan," Mr Shaimiev said.

Mr Shaimiev spent the 1990s making the most of the slack provided by former president Boris Yeltsin, playing on Tatarstan's distinctive history and warning of the risks of the republic going the way of the breakaway Chechnya if it was not granted considerable freedom. The result was a separate constitution, granting the head of the republic new rights which violated federal law. Tatarstan took its own economic course too, pushing ahead with rural land sales, for example, while resisting the general trend for the sell-off of state-owned assets such as the oil company Tatneft.

More important was the absence of the federal government agencies that exist in most of Russia's 89 regions. Until recently, there was no branch of the Federal Audit Chamber to keep an eye on spending. Nor did the Kremlin have a local representative. Even Mr Kiriyenko's appointee for Tatarstan only took up his job in December.

Things have begun to change. Rafael Khakimov, an academic turned political adviser to Mr Shaimiev, says the most important modification in the last few months has been to the regional budget. Whereas formerly Kazan collected taxes and sent a proportion to Moscow, now Moscow is in charge, redistributing part to Tatarstan.

He says the balance has shifted from 70 per cent to about 30 per cent of revenues retained by Tatarstan. But he says that is offset by the regional administration shifting the cost of many costly projects such as infrastructure on to Moscow. One local academic argues that there has been an important psychological shift in recent months, with civil servants switching allegiance along with their pay cheques, and now considering that their masters are in Moscow rather than Kazan.

He points to the judges in the Tatarstan Constitutional Court, which last year took the unprecedented step of overturning a law in the regional parliament that would have obliged all presidential candidates to speak Tatar.

Despite such changes, Mr Shaimiev's personal power remains enormous. He may have supported Yevgeny Primakov in the 1999 parliamentary elections against the pro-Putin Unity party, but he appears to have been forgiven.

The first version of Russia's new electoral law passed last year was largely written with Mr Shaimiev in mind, allowing implementation of a clause to ban regional leaders from standing for a third term to be delayed until after Mr Shaimiev had run again late last month.

While the Kremlin has been able to put up alternative candidates to crush incumbent governors in other regions, it seemed unable or unwilling to find any serious rivals to Mr Shaimiev. Furthermore, the local branch of the Federal Election Commission did little to interfere in a campaign which re-elected the head of the republic with the extraordinarily high poll of 79 per cent of the votes.

Robert Sadykov, the Communist candidate, who polled just over 2 per cent, complains that the local police even confiscated his electoral materials and detained his supporters.

In the state museum opposite the Kazan Kremlin, an exhibition displayed campaign posters for the incumbent, but none for any rivals. While he vigorously denied it, the very timing of Mr Kiriyenko's own official visit three days ahead of the election looked much like an endorsement of Mr Shaimiev.

Some in Mr Kiriyenko's camp argue that Mr Shaimiev came to a compromise earlier this year with the Kremlin. He won tacit federal endorsement in exchange for agreeing to bring Tatarstan's constitution into line by this summer. They suggest he might even stand down during his current term in favour of a Putin loyalist.

Mr Shaimiev has proved willing to change his spots in the past. He turned reformer after being a Communist who supported the putsch against Mikhail Gorbachev. Once a protectionist, he most recently campaigned as a free market liberal.

In doing so, he has been able to retain his personal power, and has consolidated the place of his own family members in influential positions within the regional administration and business. But his latest compromise shows that Tatarstan is now at least having to pay greater heed to Moscow than during much of the last decade.