MOSCOW – President Vladimir Putin on Monday responded to the Beslan school siege and other recent attacks with measures aimed at tightening the Kremlin’s grip on power, arguing that the escalation of terrorism is putting Russia’s future at stake.

One of the most controversial steps in Putin’s plan is a measure that would eliminate election of parliament members through the individual races that now yield half the seats in Russia’s Duma. Under his plan, all members of the lower chamber would be drawn from party lists, a move that would further strengthen Putin’s United Russia Party’s control of parliament.

He also said Russia’s governors would be appointed instead of being elected by popular vote. And he added that the country needed to create a centralized anti-terrorism agency, though he provided little detail about the agency’s structure or how it would work.

Putin acknowledged that the steps he outlined were drastic adjustments to Russia’s political structure. But he argued that in the wake of three recent major attacks that killed more than 400 people, the steps were warranted.

“The organizers and perpetrators of the terror attack are aiming at the disintegration of the state, the breakup of Russia,” he said. “We need a single organization capable of not only dealing with terror attacks but also working to avert them, destroy criminals in their hideouts and, if necessary, abroad.”

Putin’s plan appeared aimed at convincing Russia that the Kremlin is ratcheting up its war against terrorists. It comes at a time when Russians, for the first time in Putin’s 4 1/2 years in office, have begun to have doubts that the former KGB agent is the pillar of security they have revered with almost cultlike adulation.

For many Russians, the school siege in southern Russia that killed at least 330 people, many of them children, has laid bare the most significant failure of Putin’s presidency: His plan for peace in Chechnya has collapsed, and that has paved the way for militant attacks that Russia’s security structure was glaringly unprepared for.

On Moscow streets, the fear of another attack is palpable and everywhere.

“If the authorities do not do something now, this is going to come down like an avalanche, trapping all of us,” said Valentina Chucheva, 56.

At the core of the crisis that Putin and Russia face is the conflict in Chechnya, which has metastasized from a separatist struggle for independence into a springboard for terrorism. Five years ago, Putin vowed to “rub out the Chechens in their outhouses.” Today the conflict roils on, stoked by radical Islamic influences, Kremlin policy miscues and atrocities committed by Russian troops against Chechen civilians.

“Right now, I don’t see anything being done correctly in Chechnya,” said Alexei Malashenko, a leading Chechnya affairs analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center. “Those who determine Putin’s policy in Chechnya lack competence.”

Putin inherited the Chechen conflict from his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, who sent Russian tanks into the Connecticut-size mountain province in 1994 to quell a separatist uprising led by a former Soviet air force commander, Dzhokar Dudayev.

Chechen separatist fighters put up fierce resistance and ultimately fought Russian troops to a standoff. In 1996, Yeltsin agreed to a cease-fire that gave Chechen rebels exactly what they wanted – de facto independence from Moscow.

Shortly afterward, chaos paralyzed the province. The withdrawal of Russian troops allowed Arab Islamic extremists to gain a foothold in Chechnya. They won over Chechen separatist warlords with the lure of money, arms and fighters. Kremlin money earmarked for reconstruction projects in the province was stolen by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats in Moscow and Grozny, Chechnya’s capital.

The province’s elected president at the time, separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov, succumbed to pressure from radicals and introduced Islamic law. Grim images of public executions in Grozny were broadcast on Russian television.

In the summer of 1999, Chechen separatist warlord Shamil Basayev and other adherents of Islamic extremism invaded the neighboring Islamic province of Dagestan. That September, a series of apartment bombings in Moscow and elsewhere killed 300 people, a wave of attacks that the Kremlin blamed on Chechen guerrillas.

The bombings helped rally Russians around Putin, then prime minister, who had vowed to crush the rebellion. His hard-line approach toward Chechnya helped propel him into power. Since then, Russian troops have wrested control of Chechnya from separatist guerrillas but never have been able to neutralize them.

Operating in small bands and using the highlands of the North Caucasus Mountains as refuge, Chechen guerrillas ambush Russian military checkpoints and convoys virtually at will.

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A brazen militant guerrilla raid on schools and other buildings in Grozny the weekend before Chechnya’s Aug. 29 presidential election left at least 22 Russian and pro-Moscow Chechen servicemen dead.

In recent years radicalized elements of the separatist movement have turned increasingly to attacks to pressure the Kremlin. Since 1999, more than 1,000 Russians have been killed in terrorist attacks linked to the Chechen conflict, most occurring outside Chechnya.

Many of those attacks involved suicide bombings, often carried out by women who are the widows or sisters of Chechen men killed in the province’s decade-long conflict.

The Russian military’s response to the attacks has only swelled the ranks of the separatists. After major terrorist acts and other outbreaks of violence, Russian troops routinely conduct roundups of fighting-age Chechen men and relatives of suspected Chechen fighters. At times the bodies of Chechens kidnapped in the sweeps are found mutilated and battered as a warning to other Chechens.

Those who survive tell of being bludgeoned or tortured with electric shocks.

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Russia also has failed to shore up security, even after several high-profile attacks such as the 2002 takeover of a Moscow theater by Chechen guerrillas that ended in the deaths of 129 hostages. Just two months later, in December, suicide bombers obtained security passes, Russian military uniforms and trucks with Russian military license plates before detonating their bomb-laden vehicles near Grozny’s pro-Moscow administration building, killing 82 people.

Today, Chechen militants appear able to strike when and where they choose. A bomb placed underneath a parade viewing platform killed Chechnya’s president, Akhmad Kadyrov, May 9.

In the last year and a half, terrorist attacks blamed on Chechen guerrillas also have targeted the Moscow subway, a Moscow rock concert and a military hospital in southern Russia.

After suicide bomb blasts brought down two Russian passenger jets Aug. 24, killing 90 people, experts criticized security at Russia’s airports, saying checked baggage rarely is scrutinized carefully at regional airports and that larger airports lack technology to detect certain kinds of explosives.

Corruption rife within Russian law enforcement has made it easy for militants to navigate through the labyrinth of checkpoints dotting the North Caucasus region, and at times has even allowed them to walk free. A Russian newspaper reported last week that two of the Beslan hostage-takers had been in Russian custody in 2002 and 2003 but gained their freedom by bribing police officials.

Addressing the nation after the school siege in Beslan, Putin acknowledged that the country had failed to ready itself for the threat of terrorism.

“We stopped paying enough attention to issues of defense and security,” Putin said, “and have allowed corruption to spread through the judiciary and law-enforcement agencies.

“We showed weakness,” he added, “and weak people are beaten.”

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Putin initially responded to the school siege with a vague call for better coordination of the law-enforcement agencies overseeing the volatile North Caucasus and an angry refusal to consider negotiations with Chechen separatists.

“Why don’t you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or the White House and engage in talks – ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace?” Putin said last week, according to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, in response to a question about talks with separatists.

Experts say that while Putin unfairly tags all Chechen separatists with the label of terrorist, there is not much hope of successful talks between the Kremlin and separatists not involved in mililtancy because the movement is too factionalized.

Weary of 10 years of war, Chechens long ago gave up their desire for a separate state.

“Now the majority of the population doesn’t even think of independence,” says Yuri Korgunyuk, an analyst with the Moscow-based Indem think tank. “All they care about is a normal, peaceful life.”

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Many experts believe the battle for “hearts and minds” in Chechnya is crucial to the Kremlin chances for resolving the conflict there. So far, the Kremlin has failed to come close to winning that battle.

Moscow has poured millions of dollars into the reconstruction of Chechnya, and much of that money has been stolen by Moscow bureaucrats and corrupt pro-Moscow Chechen officials.

Putin’s attempts to restore civil society through elections also have failed. The elections of Kadyrov and his successor, Alu Alkhanov, were both widely dismissed as rigged.

Somehow, many Russians say, Putin must find a new tack.

Chechnya is a wound that has festered far too long.

Its instability imperils not only Chechens, but Russians across the country’s 11 time zones.

“Any instability in any region affects the whole country, and Chechnya is the most unstable spot on the map,” said Irina Timonina, 52, a Moscow artist. “Even the most cruel, savage, punitive measures won’t help now. I think this problem will remain for decades to come.”

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