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Tuesday, June 01, 2004
Putin Plucks an Ally From St. Pete for a Kremlin Post
By Anatoly Medetsky
Moscow Times
Staff Writer
President Vladimir Putin has appointed Alexander Beglov, a St. Petersburg official who has proved his loyalty, to head the presidential administration's Control Department, a post Putin himself once held.
Beglov, 48, last Thursday replaced Valery Nazarov, who on March 12 was transferred to head the Federal Agency for Managing State Property after only three months in the job.
The Control Department monitors how authorities observe federal legislation and presidential decrees. Charged with fighting corruption in the early 1990s, it became a powerful tool against Boris Yeltsin's political foes in the middle of the decade. When Putin led the department, from March 1997 to June 1998, he ordered audits of regional budgets.
The post has been a springboard for some, including Putin, who went on to head the Federal Security Service, or FSB. The current FSB director, Nikolai Patrushev, replaced Putin in the Control Department for a four-month stint. Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin also ran the department briefly, for several months in 1996 and 1997.
"Like any position close to the president, this one may be a springboard," said Yury Korgunyuk, editor of Partinfo political weekly. "But everything depends on the person. Not everyone who has held it has leapfrogged ahead."
Unlike many of the people Putin has appointed from his native St. Petersburg, Beglov appears to have no ties to the secret services, judging by biographies on the Kremlin web site and in the database of the Panorama think tank.
Beglov, a construction engineer by training, might have met Putin when he was chief engineer at a Russian-German company in St. Petersburg called Melazel from 1991 to 1997, said Vladimir Pribylovsky, who heads Panorama. Putin was in charge of the city's foreign economic relations during this period.
Beglov headed the administration of the city's Kurortny district from 1999 to 2002, when he became a deputy to St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev. After Yakovlev's early resignation in June 2003 and until Valentina Matviyenko's inauguration in October, he served as acting governor.
"He secured the victory for Matviyenko" through his control over so-called administrative resources, Pribylovsky said.
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