MOSCOW, Nov 21 (Reuters) - Russia's powerful regional bosses urged the central government on Thursday to ease its increasingly tight grip on the country -- a tactic Moscow hopes will help bring law and order to its 89 often unruly regions.
"There is a general trend in Russia towards deeper centralisation," said Nikolai Fyodorov, president of the central Russian Chuvashia republic.
"I will tell the president today our aim is to construct a strong federal state, not an empire, and only a rational form of decentralisation is feasible here," he told reporters in Moscow.
Along with other regional leaders, Fyodorov was in Moscow to attend a meeting with President Vladimir Putin to discuss local self-government.
Putin, concerned with the extent of regional autonomy and the fractious nature of the country, has used his time in power to clip the wings of Russia's regional leaders who had amassed huge powers in the 1990s under former President Boris Yeltsin.
Regional governors have often been accused of regularly flouting federal laws and running their territories as fiefdoms.
"Moscow is often not able to solve its own problems, so how can we expect them to be able to solve ours?" Fyodorov said.
Under current legislation, the regions are governed by a number of bilateral
agreements with Moscow that often reflect the political clout of the more powerful regional bosses, leaving some regions with more autonomy than others.
A Kremlin commission is now working to replace these agreements with laws that would decree power-sharing rules applicable for all provinces and stipulate control rights over state assets, funding mandates and tax revenues.
"The president understands very well that centralisation works when a country is mired in a major political or economic crisis, but this is not the case anymore," Viktor Tolokonsky, head of the central Novosibirsk region, told the news conference.
"We must fulfil our responsibilities ourselves if we want real economic growth in this country."
According to earlier draft proposals, the Kremlin reserves the right to impose temporary direct rule over a region in case of a serious economic crisis.
Putin was elected in early 2000 on a platform of restoring strong central control. Within weeks of taking office, he announced radical plans to oust regional leaders from the Federation Council upper house of parliament and replace them with less influential figures.