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So to some observers inside and outside Russia, Presi-dent Vladimir Putin's announcement in September that he was overhauling the nation's political system and further curtailing democratic reforms as a response to the terrorist attack on a school in Beslan came as less than a shock.
Critics, however, said the changes, if enacted, would violate the Constitution and stifle what little political opposition remains in Russia, not much more than a decade after it began its bold experiment with democracy.
Putin announced the changes after militants from the Russian Republic of Chechnya and other terrorists took over the school in Beslan in September, leading to the deaths of 331 people, about half of them children. (Chechen militants, who are seeking independence for the largely Muslim republic, were also responsible for the downing of two Russian airliners in August, which killed 89 people.) Putin argued that Russia was unprepared to fight terrorism and that the country needed a more unified political system.
"Those who inspire, organize, and carry out terrorist acts are striving to disintegrate the country," Putin said in remarks that the state-run TV channels broadcast repeatedly. "They strive for the breakup of the state, for the ruin of Russia. I am sure that the unity of the country is the main prerequisite for victory over terror."
FIVE YEARS AS PRESIDENT
Since Russia adopted its new Constitution in 1993 following the collapse of the Soviet Union two years earlier, residents of the country's 89 regions have elected their Governors or, in some places, Presidents. They have also sent their own regional deputies to Moscow, Russia's capital.
Under Putin's proposals, the regional leaders would no longer be elected by popular vote but rather by local legislatures, and only after the President's nomination. Rep-resentatives to the lower house of the federal Parliament, or Duma, would be elected on national party slates, instead of in local district races across the country.
While these proposed changes are subject to parliamentary approval, it is almost a foregone conclusion because the United Russia party that is loyal to Putin controls two-thirds of Parliament's 450 seats.
The changes would amount to Putin's most significant rollback of democratic reforms in his almost five years in office. Since former President Boris N. Yeltsin elevated Putin, a former head of the KGB, to the presidency on Dec. 31, 1999, Putin has steadily consolidated political power in the executive branch.
Putin has taken away the power to appoint members of the upper house of Parliament from Russia's regions. He imposed a structure of seven federal districts over the country, each led by his appointees. He also tightened control over the press, leading some critics to complain that state-run Russian TV is starting to sound as bland and self-serving as it did during Soviet times.
A VAST, UNRULY NATION
In other ways, during Putin's time in power, Russia has seemed to make strides toward modernization. Its economy, measured by gross domestic product, has grown an impressive 6.5 percent a year between 1998 and 2003, due in part to higher oil production and prices. (Russia is now the second-largest oil exporter after Saudi Arabia.) The economic expansion has led to higher incomes and a surge in consumer spending, as Russians in Moscow and other urban areas line up to purchase foreign cars and cell phones.
But Russia's newfound economic muscle and its adoption of some Western consumer habits have not changed the fact that it is a vast, unruly nation sprawled uneasily between Eastern Europe and northern Asia. For most of its history, it has been ruled with an iron fist by princes and conquerors, czars, and Soviet dictators.
Today, the Russian Federation and its 21 republics (which are similar to America's states) are home to some 160 different ethnic groups that don't all embrace the idea of a greater Russia. It was these divisions that the fighters who seized the school in Beslan, in the Republic of North Ossetia, seemed eager to stoke: In the 13 years since the Soviet Union's collapse, Russia has failed to develop a sense of national identity. Indeed, in the southern and Asian areas where Russia's Muslim groups live, an ardent religious identification threatens to take its place.
DEMOCRACY'S CRITICS
Democracy, Putin suggested in remarks after the school siege, does not result in stability, but rather instability. It does not unify, but rather divides. That division, he suggested, can be controlled only with a strong hand from above.
"Given that Russia is not a melting pot, but rather a fragmented pot, he does not believe that democracy is the solution," says Clifford Kupchan of the Nixon Center, a foreign policy research group in Washington, D.C.
What was striking following Putin's announcement was how many Russian elected officials endorsed his plan. "Elections are often dirty, with money from the shadow economy and criminal groups trying to influence the results," Valentina I. Matviyenko, Governor of St. Petersburg, told a Russian news service. "An end will be put to various demonstrations of extremism, religious, political, and other," said the Governor of Saratov Oblast, in southeast Russia.
'STRANGLING FREEDOMS'?
Grigory A. Yavlinsky, one of the country's most prominent liberals, says the public's concept of democracy has been tainted by financial scandals, a decade of war in Chechnya, and terrorist attacks. "All this period of time was called democracy," Yavlinsky says. "The people looked at it and said, ‘If that is democracy, then, thank you very much.' "
But there is also concern that Russia is taking a great leap backward. "We had such a long period of restrictions," says Vladislav V. Yefimov, a bookkeeper in Cheboksary, the capital of the republic of Chuvashia. "We were fed up with them. Now we are going to have them again."
Sergei S. Mitrokhin, a leader of the liberal Yabloko party, says Putin's plan represents "the elimination of the last links in a system of checks and balances."
The most prominent criticism, though, came from the two men who, arguably, did much to create the system Russia has today. In separate essays, Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader who presided over the end of the Soviet Union, wrote that Russia should preserve the democratic gains of the past 13 years. "Strangling freedoms and curtailing democratic rights," Yeltsin wrote, "marks, among other things, the victory of terrorists."
