PRESIDENT Putin issued a clarion call for bolder reforms yesterday, widening the gap between Russia's leader and his erstwhile supporters among the hardliners.
In his annual "state of the nation" address, Mr Putin said that now political stability had been restored after a turbulent decade of change, improving living standards was the next big challenge.
"I have already said that Russia needs more ambitious policies, a higher rate of economic growth," he told a special session of both houses of parliament. State institutions should work together to achieve this, he said.
For Russia's communists and nationalists it was a further sign of how the president has fallen from favour. Like spurned lovers, they have swung from rapturous delight to wary approval to outright hostility.
Where once they praised him for his backing of the military and championing of the old Soviet national anthem, now they heap abuse on him.
His pro-Western stance and pursuit of economic liberalisation have even earned him sneering comparisons with two hate figures for the hardliners, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.
"It was directed at the Americans and the Europeans rather than his own country," Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist Party leader, said of yesterday's speech in the Kremlin. "It was cheerless and uninteresting."
At its most extravagant, the criticism portrays the former KGB officer as a helpless nonentity, the puppet of Russian tycoons, the Yeltsin-era ancien regime and the West.
Highlighting the trend is a new novel by a nationalist guru, Alexander Prokhanov, a satire on Mr Putin's rise to power. Its title, Mr Hexogen, refers to the explosives used in bombs which destroyed several blocks of flats in 1999.
The author, editor of the influential weekly Zavtra, joins some of the president's liberal enemies in blaming the blasts not on Chechen terrorists, the official culprits, but on those grooming Mr Putin to succeed Mr Yeltsin.
"The Kremlin planned it all," he said recently. "There are various dots in a row. They needed a Chechen war for Putin to become president. But there is one mysterious dot in this line and that is the explosions."
The end of the Yeltsin era is depicted in his book as a diabolic orgy of evil, peopled by half-man, half-beast reformers and grotesque oligarchs, all of them manipulated by KGB veterans.
The vitriolic attack on Mr Putin is also noteworthy because its author, admittedly a maverick, was once an enthusiastic admirer of the then newly elected president.
Emerging from a private audience with Mr Putin in the Kremlin two years ago, Mr Prokhanov described his host as "masterful".
Now, he dismisses the president as "a zero, a hologram, one minute it's there, the next it isn't, a play of the light."
He recalled: "Then, I didn't have the chance to stretch out my hand and prod him. If I had, I am sure that my hand would have passed straight through this cloud and come out the other side."
Until now, Mr Zyuganov has been careful to condemn the Kremlin's policies or Mr Putin's entourage rather than the man himself.
"He is carrying out Gorbachev's policy: saying one thing and doing another," the Communist leader complained recently. "He talks of strengthening our influence in the world and Nato bases appear in Central Asia and American colonels in Georgia."
Halfway through his four-year term, a squeeze on living standards caused by cuts in housing subsidies and resurgent anti-American sentiment could, in theory, erode Mr Putin's astonishing popularity.
And yet, despite their rhetoric and support among the victims of reform, the communists seem as ill prepared as any other political force to exploit discontent.