[jcat]

FOR many Russians it was a week of funerals, mourning and horrified disbelief. The reaction of Vladimir Putin to the deaths in Beslan, however, has been rather different: to go on the offensive.

The Russian president ordered his country’s Federal Security Service to offer an unprecedented reward of 300 million rubles (£5.7m) for information that could help "neutralise" Shamil Basayev, the Chechen warlord said to have masterminded the school hostage siege in which more than 300 people died, and of separatist former Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov.

In words which echoed those of President George Bush after the September 11 attacks, Russia’s chief of general staff, Col-Gen Yuri Baluyevsky, also weighed in by declaring: "We will liquidate terrorist bases in any region of the world."

On the international propaganda front, Britain was blasted for granting refugee status to Akhmed Zakayev, an envoy for Maskadov.

"Granting asylum to people involved in terrorism - and Russia has documented evidence of this - undermines the unity of the anti-terrorist coalition," foreign minister Sergey Lavrov warned.

The first consequence of the events in Beslan has been to make Putin even more determined to reject out of hand any modification of his long-standing policy to refuse all dialogue with Chechen separatists.

Talking to a group of foreign journalists at his country house outside Moscow last week, he accused the West of double standards. "Why do you not meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House and engage in talks; ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace?" he asked.

It was Putin’s first meeting with foreigners since the Beslan massacre, and was designed to signal to the world that Putin regards the military campaign in Chechnya as part of the war against international terrorism.

No one doubts that Putin genuinely shares the public dismay that is sweeping through Russia as a result of the horrendous denouement at Beslan. Moreover, his hardline rhetoric has resonance with ordinary Russians, most of whom are much more concerned about their personal security than in negotiating with the Chechens.

Russian public opinion hardened further last week when forensic examination of 10 of the bodies of the hostage-takers revealed that six were Chechen and four were from neighbouring Ingushetia - also a Muslim region.

But Putin’s tough talk also has a deeper purpose. Calling on all Russians to rally round their leader in this hour of need, as Putin did in a televised address to the nation last week, happens to dovetail perfectly in to his own long-term plan to concentrate political and economic power in his own hands.

Russia has endured a dozen major terrorist attacks in recent years, with massive loss of life. In the past two weeks alone, more than 400 people have been killed. As acts of terrorism have multiplied, so Putin’s political control has grown steadily.

Since he became president, Putin has sought to stamp out any challenges to his power by creating a pliant parliament, imposing new restrictions on regional governors and cracking down on independent TV stations. It has now reached the stage where public criticism of him is muted; just how far was revealed in the remarkable unwillingness of leading Russian politicians and bureaucrats to make any public statements about the Beslan siege.

Members of the Duma did not even break into their summer holidays to hold an emergency debate on the school crisis.

"Institutions have been dramatically weakened. Public politics is generally over in Russia, and this is the result of Putin’s rule," said Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Centre.

"His consistent policy is not to have any political opposition inside."

Igor Bunin, director of the Moscow-based Centre for Political Technologies, added: "Our system has been transformed in to one that is more administrative than political. In this kind of system, everyone waits for the president to speak first in a crisis."

Putin is a political centralist, and ever since he came to power in 2000 he has systematically chipped away at the lax decentralised system that existed under his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, though Putin himself describes his type of government as "controlled democracy", arguing that it is the only way in which a vast, disorganised country such as Russia can be run, there is ever more control and less democracy.

First up on Putin’s hitlist were Russia’s 89 regional governors, who exercised substantial autonomous powers. In his first year in office he had them removed from their seats in the Federation Council - the upper chamber of the Russian parliament.

At the same time he signed a decree carving Russia into seven enormous federal districts, each with its own governor general - all appointed by Putin. His distrust of regional élites has even extended to transferring the control of federal courts away from the regions to Moscow.

Though his United Russia party already holds a two-thirds majority in the lower house of the State Duma, Putin plans to cut the number of independent members. Half the members of the Duma are still chosen by constituencies, where independents find it easier to gain election. But the Kremlin wants to abolish constituency voting and have all members chosen by parties.

The consequence of these changes is that Putin has acquired enormous power of patronage throughout Russia. He used it ruthlessly during his campaign for re-election earlier this year, in which he won 71% of the vote. The election was condemned as unfair by international observers.

Then there is the media. Tight control of information is an important government tool in Russia once again, just as it was in the former Soviet Union.

A year after coming to power, Putin blatantly revoked the operating licences of several television stations without even the pretence of approval from the Duma.

All three major television networks are now run by the state, although they are offset somewhat by Russia’s newspapers and by lively internet channels.

Russian television was told to go easy on the grim footage from Beslan, while officials were understating the death toll and overstating the effectiveness of the special forces deployed to end the confrontation.

Soon after explosions and gunfire rocked the school, the main television channel shifted away from the scene of mayhem and broadcast a soap opera about Second World War spies. It was left to internet sites to offer fast-breaking first-hand accounts.

Putin has even jailed journalists with especially ‘dangerous’ views. In early 2000, journalist Andrei Babitsky of Radio Liberty, which is sponsored by the US, was arrested.

Babitsky had criticised the Russian government’s incursions into Chechen villages and its bombardment of Grozny. Russian authorities arrested and beat him, and he was held for several months.

Last week Raf Shakirov, the editor of Izvestia, was dismissed because his weekend edition ran a full front cover photograph of a man carrying a half-naked girl out of the school in Beslan. Inside the paper, the headline read: "The whole floor was strewn with the bodies of dead children."

The owner of the paper, the metals magnate Vladimir Potanin, prides himself on good relations with the Kremlin. Shakirov’s front page was at odds with official attempts to play down the horror at Beslan.

The dismissal is ominous because the Russian printed press has, until now, managed to maintain an element of freedom in its coverage, compared with the tightly controlled television.

Then there is the economy. The arrest and trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, head of Russia’s biggest oil conglomerate, Yukos, is designed to warn Russia’s other wealthy oligarchs that Putin will not tolerate their funding of opposition parties, as Khodorkovsky did.

The Khodorkovsky case smacks of hypocrisy. Tax evasion is a massive problem for Russia. But the legal loopholes exploited by Yukos were exactly the same as those used by many other companies, whose officials have not been prosecuted because they have done nothing to upset Putin. The courts even rejected 11 offers by the company to pay up, demonstrating that the government is not interested in collecting the money but in seizing the company’s assets.

The cost to investor confidence in Russia has already been enormous, and foreign investors are taking flight. Yukos produces 2% of the world’s oil, putting it level with Kuwait. Yet Russia, the third biggest oil producer in the world, is haemorrhaging funds at a time when the oil price has been at a record high.

There is also a disturbing expansion of the influence of the security services. Security service personnel, including Putin’s old chums from his days as a KGB officer, are now being given key positions in industry - a move which could spell disaster for the Russian economy, according to many observers.

"Putin’s power base consists of secret service officers and state enterprise managers - groups known for corruption and secrecy rather than market reform and transparency," says Anders Aslund, director of the Russian and Eurasian Programme at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Russia has become structurally similar to Latin America."

"This shift back to state control is a real threat to the Russian economy because all the big success stories in recent years are to be found in the flourishing private sector, while the state is patently failing.

"Far from reforming the secret police and the state monopoly companies, Putin has made them the basis of his regime. Privatisation has all but stalled."

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