President Boris Yeltsin followed up his pledge to crack down on the mafia with a decree Tuesday granting police sweeping powers, including the right to detain for up to a month and examine the financial affairs of anyone suspected of organized crime.The new anti-crime measures, which also give police the power to search offices and dwellings without a court order, appeared just days after Yeltsin announced at a Kremlin press conference that he would personally solve the country's problems by decree.At the briefing, the president's first on domestic issues in six months, Yeltsin criticized the government for inactivity and vowed to stamp his authority on a wide range of issues from halting economic decline to combating crime.Alexei Yudin, an aide to Yeltsin's national security adviser, said by phone that the decree will give police extra powers to detain anyone suspected of involvement in crime gangs up to 30 days without making formal charges. Previously the limit had been three days."The decree aims to make the current Criminal Code work," Yudin said. "Now everything depends on concrete individuals and how they will use their extra powers."Yudin said the decree gives police the right, for the first time, to gain access to bank accounts and other commercial information of organizations suspected of criminal activity. Police believe that at least 35,000 Russian businesses are controlled by crime gangs.In an apparent response to Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who last week demanded extra powers to fight organized crime in Moscow, Yeltsin granted local authorities the right "reinforce" police units in the most crime-ridden areas, Yudin said, but did not elaborate on what that meant.Yeltsin arrived in Blagoveshchensk, capital of the Amur region on the Chinese border, on Tuesday as part of a fact-finding mission to Russia's Far East aimed at resurrecting the area's subsidy-dependent economy. Interfax reported that Yeltsin hoped to attract foreign investment to the region from Asian economic powers China, Japan and South Korea. The president is scheduled to continue on to Tuva on the Mongolian border and stop over in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk before returning to Moscow on Thursday.Federal officials have rushed to respond to the battle cries Yeltsin issued last week. A day after the president ordered Russia's interior minister, public prosecutor and chief counterintelligence official to oversee personally the fight against the mafia, the three held a rare joint briefing on their anti-crime program, which they said would save the state 10 trillion rubles ($5.2 billion) in damages and lost revenues.After Yeltsin told the military that it had to "be more active in cutting the number of servicemen," Defense Minister Pavel Grachev said Monday that the military would reduce its strength army to 1.9 million by October, down from the current 2.2 million in the armed forces, Interfax reported.As Yeltsin appeared to be consolidating his position, a rally organized by hardline Communist and nationalists groups fizzled on Russian Independence Day on Sunday when only about 2,000 of an expected 40,000 demonstrators showed up. Those who did show chanted angry slogans and waved banners calling for a return of the Soviet Union at a rally near the Bolshoi Theater, unperturbed by the steady rain that forced the cancellation of official celebrations of the four-year anniversary of Russian sovereignty.While the opposition scorned the economic hardship they blame on the reforms of economist Yegor Gaidar, the former acting prime minister was rallying his new political party, Russia's Democratic Choice, to unite reformers.Gaidar won election to the leadership of the new party Sunday with a 490-14 vote, but failed to secure the president's endorsement.Yeltsin's press secretary, Vyacheslav Kostikov, and his chief of staff, Sergei Filatov, attended the party's inaugural conference, but refused to offer any guarantee that the president would endorse the party in the future.Kostikov said he believed Yeltsin needed to keep a "reasonable, calm and suitable distance" from Gaidar's party.Many reformers blame Yeltsin's aloof stance and Gaidar's leadership for the election defeat suffered by the reformist alliance Russia's Choice in the parliamentary elections of last December.