Early gambit to fill Putin vacuum

"We need to unite everyone who believes Russia has a chance to be a European country, with democracy, press freedom, and a competitive economy," says Alexander Shishlov, a member of Yabloko's governing bureau. "We must move into action now."

Experts say the Kremlin has ordered two Putin confidantes, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, to raise their public profiles as potential presidential heirs in 2008.

But the failure of former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma to secure his own successor through fixed elections last year may have the Kremlin doubting its ability to carry off a similar operation.

"The events in Ukraine scared Russia's authorities," says Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. "It showed the system of control, though stable now, has its limits."

Former President Boris Yeltsin, seriously ill and hobbled by corruption scandals, kept everyone guessing until the last moment about his plans for the succession. He went through a string of prime ministers - the legal heir under Russian law - before appointing Putin in August 1999. Four months later, Mr. Yeltsin abruptly resigned, giving Putin time to consolidate his grip as acting president before having to face elections.

A likely scenario, many experts suggest, is that the Kremlin will do an end run around all its opponents by reworking Russia's Constitution to keep Putin himself in office after 2008.

"A new group of oligarchs has come to power under Putin" who stand to lose a lot if he leaves, says Dmitri Oreshkin, an expert with the Merkator Group, a political consultancy. "Putin himself has developed a taste for power. It would be difficult for him to part from it."

The Public Chamber will be a kind of parallel parliament, proposed by Putin after last September's terrorist siege in Beslan to "increase citizens' participation in government."

All delegates to the 126-member body would be appointed by the president or his representatives. The Chamber could put forward sweeping constitutional revisions by the end of this year.

"The Public Chamber can put forward the initiative to change the Constitution, and it will seem to have come from the public," says Mr. Pribylovsky. He says Putin has the necessary backing in the Duma and Russia's regions to impose a new charter, which could include a third term for the president or a whole new system of power, but needs to get started now to have changes in place by 2008.

The idea of rewriting fundamental law to suit one man may sound odd to Americans, but Russian Constitutions have frequently been the playthings of individual leaders. Every major head of state since Czar Nicholas II has produced his own, including Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Joseph Stalin in 1936, Leonid Brezhnev in 1978, and Boris Yeltsin in 1993. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was working on his version when the USSR collapsed in 1991.

"Putin's citadel has weakened," says Mr. Oreshkin. "The idea at the top now is that they should do everything to stay in power, at any cost."

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