Putin's new decree signed last week authorizing the reform was drafted, as expected with the full input and cooperation of the top commanders of the current Federal Security Service, or FSB.

The FSB played a direct role in drafting the decree, which means that virtually all the proposals made by the counter-intelligence service have been taken into account, the Pravda.ru web-suite reported.

The decree streamlines severely the old top-heavy command structure of the security services, concentrating far more power in the service's director and his top lieutenants. He will now have only two top lieutenants instead of the previous 12.

FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev will now also exercise a lot more director power, Pravda.ru said. From now on, he will determine the number and members if the FSB board. He will be able to give service heads additional administrative functions with regard to other structures in the FSB system. This, naturally, means increased responsibility for the above-mentioned chiefs for how their services are run.

FSB Deputy Director Yevgeny Lovyrev said the restructuring was meant to make the FSB more democratically accountable since its very top officials could not hide behind a collegium of joint leadership with their colleagues or claim ignorance of the doings of subordinates who would now be directly accountable to them.

Still, the reform has stirred up many old fears among Russian liberals and human rights activists. Aren't they being given some rather frightening new powers? analysts Ekaterina Dobrynina and Tamara Shkel asked in the newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta July 15.

Many of these fears may be misplaced as the 21st century Russia of Putin is a far cry from the fearsome communist super-state of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Josef Stalin in the first half of the 20th century.

It is probably now beyond the Russians to recreate an agency with the reach or the effectiveness of the KGB, Nick Holdworth and Robin Gedye wrote in the London Daily Telegraph July 15. Also, like the rest of the state machine, it is also very short of money, they added.

Putin's sweeping structural overhaul and streamlining of Russia's security services was expected for three major reasons:

First, it is consistent with his Herculean efforts to reform and streamline Russia's traditionally cumbersome and notoriously inefficient government and national bureaucracy.

The reorganization of the siloviki is entirely consistent with the overall state administration reform plan, Dobrynina and Shkel wrote. As elsewhere, it involves cutting superfluous functions and spending estimates and 'optimization' accompanied by 'increased accountability for leaders.'

Indeed, Putin's strong point in the first years after he succeeded Yeltsin was his combination of administrative energy and efficiency, reviving a national state structure that had previously seemed to be beyond its last gasp.

Second, Putin is an old siloviki, or state security veteran himself. He was a career KGB officer who rose up to command its successor organization under Yeltsin before becoming first prime minister and then president. And he has consistently publicly expressed his admiration for the history of the notorious organs, especially longtime KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov.

Putin has also consistently boosted the powers of the state security services through his first four-year term as president, Indeed, the continuing full-scale assault on the huge Yukos oil corporation and its jailed former chairman Mikhail Khodorkovky has been seen in part as being driven by the goal of giving the siloviki instead of the newly rich billionaire oligarchs control of the Commanding Heights of the new free enterprise Russian economy.

Finally, Putin's bold gamble in consolidating the old state security agencies was driven by his recognition that the old system simply was not working, despite the renewed resources and confidence he had produced to try and strengthen it.

At the heart of the organ failure is the dire new wave of terrorist attacks by Chechen secessionist guerrillas. President Akhmad Kadyrov of Chechnya, Putin's most important ally in the still-rebellious autonomous republic in the Caucasus, was killed in a terror bombing in a soccer stadium in Grozny May 9 while celebrating the great Soviet victory over Nazi Germany at the end of the 1941-45 Great Patriotic War, known in the West as World War II. Then in June, more than 90 people were killed when Chechen guerrilla groups rampaged through the cities in neighboring Ingushetia.

The state security services have so far proven entirely unable to penetrate the main Chechen terror groups or coordinate effective defenses against them. Since those two main attacks, Chechen guerrillas have gone on a spree of murdering Putin allies and loyalists in Chechnya, apparently with impunity.

The need to optimize this very important agency has long been felt, Mikhail Grishankov, first deputy chairman of the Duma security committee told Rossiiskaya Gazeta. Times are changing: new threats are arising to the security of the state and its citizens. And the service which exists in order to maintain that security must also change.

But however necessary the reforms were, and however successful they may prove to be, Russia's fearsome history is bound to guarantee that old worries will die hard. As Dobrynina and Shkel wrote: The view of ordinary citizens may be summed up in a single phrase: 'That's all very well, but you never know what might happen. ...'

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