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Moscow Times
September 16, 2004
Paving Way for a Presidential Coup d'Etat
By Andrei Piontkovsky

President Vladimir Putin's speech on Monday, at an expanded government session involving the heads of Russia's 89 regions, was morally blasphemous, legally illiterate and politically devastating.

The tin-pot Zhirinovsky-Putin plans to transform the Russian Federation into a unitary state and to strengthen the existing regime of personal power have long been gathering dust in bureaucrats' desk drawers. Putin opportunistically used the national tragedy in Beslan to tack them onto his "complex of counter-terrorist measures" and foist them upon a stunned public.

The procedure proposed by the president for appointing governors contradicts a whole range of articles of the Constitution and rulings of the Constitutional Court. For example, there is a chapter of the Constitution entitled "The President of the Russian Federation," which scrupulously enumerates all the constitutional powers of the person who occupies the presidential office: he nominates the prime minster, subject to confirmation by the State Duma; he nominates the prosecutor general, subject to confirmation by the Federation Council, and so on. The list is extremely long. Such is the super-presidential Constitution that Boris Yeltsin had written for himself.

However, nowhere does it say that the president nominates governors, subject to confirmation by regional legislatures. If Putin expands his powers -- as he plans to do -- without making the necessary constitutional amendments, then it will be a coup d'etat.

Of course, with the razor-sharp "power vertical," it would be no problem to amend the Constitution.

But it raises an important question: Where did all the people like Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref, Presidential Envoy Dmitry Kozak, Presidential Chief of Staff Dmitry Medvedev and Putin himself study? They are all supposed to be graduates of Leningrad State University's law faculty, most of whom studying under Anatoly Sobchak's watchful gaze. Or was their student status merely a cover for other activities?

In any case, steps to transform a federation into a unitary state in a multi-ethnic country like Russia are suicidal.

The Soviet Union started down the path of disintegration when Kremlin bureaucrats fell under the illusion that "a new historical collective -- the Soviet people" had come into being. And now it seems that the chekists have fallen under the illusion that a new "historical collective," the "Putin people," has come into being.

In general, Putin has a rather strange and somewhat disdainful attitude toward the country that he heads: "And we named the new country the Russian Federation," the president said in his address to the nation on Sept. 4. Indeed, why not name the country Putinania, for example.

Many, if not all, of his legislative innovations and his neologisms point to the fact that psychologically Putin is firmly located in the golden age of the Soviet Union.

What a life it was back then, wrapped up in the warm, soft overcoat of Felix Dzerzhinsky, sipping on delicious German beer at the undemanding KGB outpost in Dresden, feeling oneself a vital cog in the Great Empire.

The Vladimir Putin of today is a chekist Akaky Akakiyevich -- the hero in Gogol's "The Overcoat" -- who has had his overcoat stolen by wicked people and been placed on the throne of an unfamiliar and comfortless country named, for some reason, the Russian Federation.

Andrei Piontkovsky, an independent political analyst, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.