Mysterious moves by the army and increasingly powerful special security services with roots in the KGB are provoking fears that Russia is in danger of becoming a police state again.


"Everything that is happening shows that the policy of Russia" and "the whole new system are a continuation of the old Soviet system, inheriting fully its immorality, cruelty and tendency to tell lies," said political writer Yury Burtin in the weekly Moscow News newspaper.


The liberal Izvestia newspaper added: "The impunity of the special services could lead to a police state in Russia."


Russian authorities deny a police state could return. But fears have been stoked by several incidents in the last few weeks and by signs Moscow is set to use force in the rebel region of Chechnya.


President Boris Yeltsin's Security Council, which groups security and defense ministers, is also turning from an advisory body into a powerful decision-maker.


The incidents varied from the tragic, when Russian bombs killed innocent people in Chechnya, to the farcical, when special services came close to a shootout in central Moscow.


But all involved the armed forces or security organizations which have emerged since the demise of the KGB security police.


"To prevent a police regime, we must get public answers from the authorities to the questions piling up," Izvestia said.


The stories read like detective novels but have become facts of life in a country with a huge nuclear arsenal.


In one case, the Federal Counterintelligence Service secretly recruited officers from elite army units and offered to pay them to take part in an attempt by Chechnya's Moscow-backed opposition to topple separatist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev.


The raid failed and scores of Russian servicemen were captured. But the authorities disowned them, calling them mercenaries.


Planes then bombed Chechnya several times, killing ordinary citizens.


Russia denied responsibility at first but after days of denials, and facing mounting evidence, the Federal Counterintelligence Service and the army finally came clean.


The counterintelligence service said the officers were carrying out their "patriotic duty" to remove the "criminal" Chechen authorities while the army admitted Russian planes had bombed "strategic objects" in Chechnya.


The likelihood of Moscow using troops to bring the independence-minded Chechnya to heel is ringing alarm bells in Russia's democratic camp.


"Once our authorities get a taste for making simple decisions by force, and once they have glued themselves to the generals with blood, they will be unable to stop," said Burtin.


The Federal Counterintelligence Service was thrust into the limelight last week when it suffered an apparent defeat at the hands of another secret service -- Yeltsin's personal guards.


The power of Yeltsin's guards was evident when Yevgeny Savostyanov said Thursday he was sacked as deputy head of the counterintelligence servicelast week, hours after clashing with them.


Savostyanov went personally Friday when the head of MOST-Bank, one of Moscow's leading commercial banks, summoned the Federal Counterintelligence Service because unidentified armed men had surrounded the building housing the bank and Mayor Yury Luzhkov's office.


The mysterious men initially ignored Savostyanov's order to identify themselves and resisted counterintelligence service officers who detained some of them.


"After checks were made, it was established that those citizens belonged to the Russian president's guard. Several hours later I was released from my duties," Savostyanov said.


The head of Yeltsin's guards, Alexander Korzhakov, figures in the top 10 most influential political figures in most recent opinion polls.