President Vladimir Putin keeps the surprises coming. Last month he suddenly promoted a grey apparatchik, Viktor Zubkov, to prime minister. Now he says he will head the parliamentary list of United Russia, the main pro-Kremlin party, in elections this December, and that he may even become prime minister himself after he leaves the presidency next March. He thereby gives every appearance of wanting to use the machinery of democracy to consolidate his near-total dominance of Russian politics. That will be a neat trick - if it works.
The Zubkov appointment wrongfooted neo-Kremlinologists, who then concluded Mr Putin must be lining up this former courtier from the Russian leader's St Petersburg days as a temporary stand-in as president before Mr Putin himself returned to the top job. Apparently not. It is beginning to look as though the master of the Kremlin not only wants to observe the constitutional niceties preventing him from standing for a third term as president, but to change the structure of Russian power.
That structure has always had a clearly dominant figure and, if Mr Putin pursues what he calls his "entirely realistic" idea, it means the powers of Russia's prime minister will have to be enhanced at the expense of the presidency.
President Putin commands the support of a good 70 per cent of Russians and he could probably lift the numbers of United Russia to the two-thirds majority in the Duma needed to change the constitution and redistribute power. Under that scenario, United Russia, hitherto an ideas-free Putin vehicle, would transmute into a ruling party with long-term tenure - not so much a Communist-style one-party set-up as like an Institutional Revolutionary party, which ruled Mexico for most of the last century.
If Mr Putin intends to run things - and clearly, he does - then it is arguably better that he rules through institutions than from behind the scenes as, say, head of an arm of the state such as Gazprom. Yet even for someone so clearly in control, it is not easy to rejig the sources of real power. This transition is not over yet.
Addressing his United Russia followers on Monday, Mr Putin reminded them how he had pulled Russia out of the shambles of the post-Soviet 1990s and restored its pride and place in the world (where its belligerent swagger was again on show yesterday with Gazprom's threat to cut off gas to Ukraine).
With this formally democratic power play, Mr Putin is signalling he still craves legitimacy for himself and Russia's political system.
