President Vladimir Putin's decision to break Russia into seven separate regions indicates the start of a policy to centralise power in the Kremlin.
At present the Russian regions are run by elected governors. Mr Putin's decree will mean that the seven super-regions will be run by non-elected officials appointed by the President himself.
There is some concern in Russia that the seven regions coincide almost exactly with Russia's seven military districts. In only two of them will the civilian and military commands be based in different towns.
Nizhny Novogord has been designated the centre of the Volga region's civil administration, in which the military headquarters is in Samara. In Siberia the military centre remains in Chita with the new civil headquarters in Novosibirsk.
Mr Putin's decision envisages that his seven emissaries will have strong powers over law-enforcement agencies in the regions and, according to the liberal newspaper, Izvestia, his "plenipotentiary envoys" will have special powers to put presidential policies into operation in "martial law situations".
The lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, which now has a large number of pro-Kremlin deputies, is drafting a Bill to allow for the dismissal of elected governors for breach of federal legislation.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, former President Boris Yeltsin made a famous announcement in which he advised Russia's regions to grab as much power as they could. Since then Russia has operated to some extent as a federation of city states, few of which paid attention to the central authority in the Kremlin.
Moscow, for example, operated its own economic reform programme and ignored the one being operated in the rest of the country. It did so with far greater success than the national model but the Russian far east, particularly Vladivostok, lagged well behind national levels.
Mr Putin's plan appears to be an attempt to introduce direct rule from Moscow. It will be interesting to see what measure of success it achieves. It will also be interesting to see who Mr Putin selects for his seven-person team of regional envoys. A high proportion of former KGB operatives may set off alarm signals inside and outside Russia.
The action of the KGB's successor agency, the FSB, in raiding three premises in Moscow owned by Media-Most, the only major media organisation not to support Mr Putin in the presidential elections, is still the major source of controversy in Russia. Protests have been made not only by opposition politicians but by two former prime ministers.
Both Mr Sergei Kiriyenko, who is generally regarded as being pro-Kremlin, and Mr Yevgeny Primakov, who like Mr Putin was a leading KGB operative, have expressed outrage at the raids carried out by dozens of masked agents armed with axes and automatic weapons.
The Russian Union of Journalists and editors of major national publications have sent a letter of protest to the authorities but the office of the prosecutor general denied intimidation. The deputy prosecutor general, Mr Vasily Kolmogorov, in a statement issued through the Interfax news agency, said documents had been discovered during the raids which could lead to criminal charges against the group.
At the weekend Mr Igor Domnenkov, a journalist with the investigative weekly Novaya Gazeta, was badly bludgeoned at the entrance to the apartment block in which he lived. Novaya Gazeta, like the Media-Most group, was one of the few opponents of Russian conduct in the war in Chechnya.
Reuters adds:The Russian amnesty for Chechen fighters who laid down their arms expired yesterday with no sign of progress towards peace talks. The army reported shootouts in several places and rebel leader, Mr Aslan Maskhadov, told Germany's Deutsche Welle radio there was no end to the fighting in sight.
There seemed to be little prospect that the amnesty, in effect since December, would immediately be renewed.
A senior parliamentary official, Mr Pavel Krasheninnikov, told RTR state television there was no bill yet pending to extend the measure.