Putin dismisses staff 1 week before election

MOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin fired his prime minister Tuesday -- less than three weeks before the Russian presidential election -- in a surprise stroke riding the Russian leadership of a top holdover from the Boris Yeltsin era.\nThe dismissal of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and his Cabinet also apparently bolstered the authority of Putin's inner circle of former KGB agents -- part of the former Russian secret police and intelligence agency -- and set the stage for a makeover of the country's top leadership.\nKasyanov was a strong advocate of the business tycoons many Russians regarded with disdain. His ouster is likely to widen Putin's already overwhelming lead before the March 14 presidential election by attracting voters who accused Putin of continuing Yeltsin-era policies the tycoons used to amass great wealth.\nUnder the Russian government system, the prime minister is primarily responsible for steering economic policy. The dismissal of the prime minister also means the dismissal of the rest of the government, though any of them could be reappointed.\nIn a statement broadcast on state television, Putin said he was reshuffling the Cabinet ahead of the vote to "avoid uncertainty in the federal executive structures." He said the Cabinet's performance was "satisfactory" but he wants a new government to push reforms further.\n"The president wanted to show that he was rupturing ties with the old regime," said Igor Bunin, the head of the Center for Political Technologies, an independent think-tank.\nLilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Endowment said firing Kasyanov could allow Putin to "lay blame on the government for everything he hasn't achieved during his term."\nPutin named Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko, widely perceived as essentially a yes-man for the president, as interim premier. Putin now has two weeks to submit his nomination for a new prime minister to the legislature.\n"Within a week of being appointed, the chairman of the government will have to present me with proposals for a new structure of the federal bodies of executive authority," Putin said.\nIt was unclear if that statement meant Putin was planning a major overhaul of the way the government is shaped. The timeframe also raised the possibility Putin would not have a government in place before the election.\nKasyanov was named finance minister in 1999 and became prime minister after Putin, then prime minister, was elected president in March 2000. He had clashed with Putin's proteges who were crowding the Cabinet and the presidential administration.\nSpeculation about his ouster intensified in recent months after he criticized a probe of Russia's Yukos oil giant even after Putin bluntly warned the Cabinet against meddling in the issue. The attack on Yukos is broadly perceived as the Kremlin-instigated effort to curb the political ambitions of the company's billionaire ex-chief, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.\nKasyanov had said the Yukos probe hurt Russia's investment climate and set back economic development.\n"With Kasyanov's dismissal, big business lost their last major lobbying channel in government," said Ronald Nash, the chief strategist for the Renaissance Capital investment bank.\nKasyanov was dogged by media allegations of corruption early in his career, earning him the nickname "Misha 2 percent." He shook off the negative image by championing liberal reforms and presiding over an economic boom in recent years.\nKasyanov's time as prime minister actually marked a period of relative stability. Yeltsin famously fired four prime ministers in 19 months, finally settling on Putin just months before abruptly resigning from the presidency himself Dec. 31, 1999.\n"Kasyanov represented a sense of stability with a good track record on reform," Nash said. "More reforms were implemented in the past four years than the entire past decade."\nThe ouster of the Cabinet pushed shares down briefly on the Russian stock market, but the benchmark RTSI index ended the day down only about 1.5 percent.\n"There is no sense that policy will change," said James Fenkner of the Troika Dialog investment company. "The market is waiting for a new reform push."\nFew pundits believed Khristenko will hold the job. Most said Alexei Kudrin, who served as first deputy to Kasyanov and shares Putin's St. Petersburg roots, appears to be the top candidate.\nSome mentioned Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, who like Putin, is a veteran of the KGB.\nKasyanov served in the Soviet-era state planning agency Gosplan during the 1980s and steadily rose through economic and financial posts after the Soviet collapse.\nAs deputy finance minister in 1996, he worked out a deal for repaying debts Russia inherited from the Soviet Union. Two years later, he played a key role in efforts to restore Russia's credibility after the government defaulted on foreign debt and the ruble plunged.