December 3, 2001	Monday	Ramazan 17, 1422

MOSCOW: Three centrist political movements formally united in Moscow on Saturday to form a single party that is expected to control a majority of Parliament and carry out the political agenda of President Vladimir V. Putin.

The party, called the Union of Unity and Fatherland, seems destined to become the single most powerful political organization in Russia - a status once enjoyed by the Communist Party, which still has the loyalty of one-quarter to one-third of the electorate. The founding movements were Unity, Fatherland and All-Russia. The latter two have been aligned for the last two years.

Addressing Saturday’s founding congress, Putin said that the new party should be moderate and constructive and should not jump the gun by calling itself the ruling party of Russia.

“The era of political radicalism is becoming part of the past,” Putin said. He urged the delegates to work hard, especially in regions outside Moscow, “for the sake of creating a truly powerful and modern political force in Russia.”

Putin has made it a priority of his administration to work toward the elimination of smaller political parties and create a system of several strong ones. Elected to be the chief among three co-chairmen of the new party was Sergei K. Shoigu, Russia’s emergencies minister and one of Putin’s closest confidants. Shoigu was the leader of the Unity party.

The other co-chairs are Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov, of Fatherland, and Mintimer S. Shaimiyev, president of the Russian Federation’s Tartarstan region, from the All-Russia party.

Shoigu said that the unified party hopes to “consolidate society based on the constructive policies” of Putin and that its aim is to win a majority in future elections.

“We must stop dividing everybody into people who are ours and people who are not. We must stop counting who is on whose side. As of today, we are all members of this party. We are all comrades doing our work,” Shoigu said.

Dmitri Y. Furman, a political analyst, said that the new party would be all but unassailable. “What happened today is the re-establishment of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union, only this time without Communists and their ideological dogmas,” he said.

“It will tolerate the existence of a small left-wing Communist Party alongside it and a dwarfish and marginal right-wing party.” Furman believes the party’s existence will divide Russian society into loyalists and the opposition. “It is like going back to the times of the Party and the rest of the society,” he said.

The members of the new party will hold 120 seats in the State Duma. The Communists control 85 seats, and the pro-Communist Agroindustrial faction has 42. Of the remainder, two liberal parties, Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, have 19 and 37 seats, respectively. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.