Yeltsin’s veiled attack on new Kremlin powers

RUSSIA’S first post-Soviet leader Boris Yeltsin issued a veiled warning that President Vladimir Putin’s decision to hand sweeping new powers to the Kremlin in the wake of the Beslan hostage crisis could roll back democratic freedoms.

“We should not allow ourselves to step away from the letter - or the spirit - of a constitution that the country adopted in a national referendum in 1993,” he told the Moscow News daily.

Russia’s current constitution was drafted by Yeltsin aides amid a brutal political fight with entrenched communists who, at the time, had control over the parliament.

It put power in the hands of the presidency but also introduced direct elections for regional governors and reserved half of the seats in parliament for locally elected lawmakers - measures that Putin revoked this week.

Mr Yeltsin, 73, who had anointed former KGB agent Mr Putin as his successor, broke a silence that has largely characterised his recent years to express concern about the course Russia was taking.

“The strangling of freedoms, the rollback of democratic rights - this can only mean that the terrorists won,” Mr Yeltsin said. “Only a democratic country can successfully lead a fight against terrorism,” he wrote.

Mr Putin has announced plans to abolish direct suffrage to elect regional governors across Russia in the wake of the Beslan school hostage crisis, which killed nearly 340 people, half of them children.

Gubernatorial candidates will instead be put forward by the Kremlin for local regional governments to approve.

Elections to the lower house of parliament, already two-thirds controlled by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, will be held in future only on a party list basis, ending the right of independent candidates to contest half the seats in the state Duma. The move is expected to help parties like United Russia and hurt smaller liberal factions which now have only a handful of representatives in parliament.