Abstract
The legal institute of the Plenipotentiary representatives of the President of the Russian Federation gets through a lot of substantial modifications within its existence. Its current legal and factual form is determined by effort of Vladimir Putin to centralize the federation and reinforce the vertical principle of the state power.
The main aim of this article is a critical analysis of plenipotentiary representatives and their supportive apparatus, which should give a clue about the way, how the presidential power is put into effect in the subjects of the Russian Federation. The article do not avoid issues of the federal districts, which hold a potential to replace the subjects of the federation in the future and create an easy central controlled state, i.e. restore again two-level system of state power.