President Vladimir Putin may have cowed Russia's national political leadership with his plan to concentrate still more power in the Kremlin, but in regions of the country that stand to lose the most, he has inflamed fierce popular discontent.
People in this semiautonomous region along the Volga denounced Putin's proposal to end direct elections of governors and other regional leaders as unconstitutional and potentially destabilizing. Many also said they fear the Kremlin is planning further steps to recreate a Soviet-like power over the people.
The reaction among those interviewed in Cheboksary, the capital of the republic of Chuvashia -- both ordinary voters and some elected officials -- underscored what polls suggested was seething dissent in this and the other 20 ethnic republics that had achieved a measure of autonomy since the Soviet Union disbanded.
In one poll across Russia, nearly half of those surveyed opposed Putin's proposal. But opposition here, at least anecdotally, appeared to be higher.
Putin has defended his proposal by saying he needed to unify Russia against the threat of terror. But many warn that it could have the opposite effect, stoking ethnic divisions.
"Inside this monolithic structure there will be certain movements," said Atner Khuzagay, one of the leaders of Chuvashia's drive for autonomy in the early 1990s.
"There will be tension. I would not call it resistance, but tensions will appear," he said.
It remains to be seen whether public opposition will have any effect on Putin's proposal, which his aides submitted to a pliant legislature late last month. Its leaders, all Putin loyalists, promise to adopt the changes quickly, but already there are signs of political challenges.
A regional legislator in Kaliningrad has asked Russia's Constitutional Court to clarify the legality of the proposal. The Chuvash National Congress, a private organization here, plans to meet Oct. 8 to draft a statement of opposition. Its president, Gennadi Arkhilov, called the proposal "doomed," and added, "if not now, then eventually."
Nikolai Petrov, an analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center, said the regional legislatures, which under Putin's proposal would ratify Kremlin appointees, could still balk, especially when regional laws conflicted with federal law or practice.
In Chuvashia's case, for example, its own laws require that its president be a speaker of Chuvash, a Turkic language spoken by two-thirds of the region's 1.4 million residents.
The new legislation, though, would give Putin the authority to disregard such requirements and to disband regional legislatures if they rejected his appointees twice.
To the Chuvash, Putin's proposal amounts to the end of Russia's short experiment with federalism.
"Putin needs a fully controlled system, a system where a command from the top is carried out just like in the barracks," said Yevgeny Lin, the leader of the liberal Yabloko Party in Cheboksary.
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