The tsar in the Kremlin has a perennial problem. His regional barons, scattered over the largest country on earth, swear their loyalty. But how can he be sure that when his attention is turned the other way or his power starts to fade, their allegiances will not change?


Boris Yeltsin, in his efforts first to take and then keep power, has grappled with at least three different versions of this conundrum.


Once he was the radical, who told regional leaders to "swallow as much sovereignty as you can get."


More recently he has been the centralist, who said he went to war in Chechnya to ensure the integrity of the federation. The regional question has become topical again in the last week as Yeltsin has been forced to sign decrees authorizing eight governors' elections.


It is an important step. They may appear less glamorous than the State Duma elections, but they are as important, if not more so. Duma deputies have a lot of television airtime and high profiles, but regional governors have a lot of the real stuff: political and economic power.


Yeltsin has been forced into the decrees because of the tussle over the formation of the upper chamber of parliament, the Federation Council.


The Duma has passed a law that requires all members of the council to be locally elected officials. If Kremlin-appointed heads of administrations want to win seats in the chamber they now have eight months to run for election.


The Duma has called Yeltsin's bluff quite impressively. It is quite near to his original draft law and it will be hard for him to veto it, as he did the Duma's first version, which stipulated free elections like those to the U.S. senate.


If he does not sign the new law, Yeltsin risks being without an upper chamber at all when the current mandate expires in December.


If he does sign it, he will have lit a long fuse that could eventually blow up in his face.


The president knows only too well that the voters are not kindly disposed to the men Moscow has appointed for them.


In Sverdlovsk, the dry run for the coming spate of elections, they rejected the Kremlin's man Alexei Strakhov and elected Eduard Rossel, who promised them greater freedom from Moscow.


Even the current Federation Council has proved hard to control. It twice rejected Alexei Ilyushenko as prosecutor general and refused to endorse several candidates for the Constitutional Court.


The regional leaders have their own constituencies and they know that it is important to have a friendly dialogue with the government, but that it is just as important to make their support for it fully conditional. Nor have the regional leaders taken the bait and joined up with the new government party, Our Home Is Russia.


In its most ambitious blueprint, Our Home was intended as a new party of the hierarchy, a new structure that would unite the local and national elite. That has not happened. They are keeping their own counsel.


I saw a telling example of this two weeks ago in Orenburg. Logic would suggest that in a gas-rich town -- where Viktor Chernomyrdin once worked and the local elite are his former colleagues -- Our Home would be thriving. It is not. His old friend, the mayor, says that Our Home is misconceived and that he is supporting Yury Skokov.


All of this suggests to me that a new wave of elected governors could become a source of real trouble for the Kremlin and a substantial third force in Russia.


We might see a return to 1993, when the (then-unelected) Federation Council played its own game.


Yeltsin vainly tried to co-opt their support in his battle with the Supreme Soviet, but they did not cooperate. The council was due to meet on Oct. 5, 1993, to try to hammer out a compromise between president and parliament.


The cynics say, with some justice, that fear of such a compromise was an additional reason why Yeltsin acted so brutally on Oct. 4 and used tanks to subdue the rebels in the White House.


All bets are off on what will happen to the allegiances of a lot of outwardly loyal regional leaders if the ship of the Yeltsin regime starts listing early next year, after it has taken a battering in the local elections.


The president may start to lose friends.