Regional bosses from Siberia to the Baltic stepped gingerly into the power vacuum left by Moscow's political bickering yesterday as the economic crisis began to bite deeply into the lives of ordinary Russians.
With President Yeltsin dallying over his third and final attempt to steer a prime ministerial nominee through parliament, and two of the most likely candidates shying away from the poisoned chalice of heading up a crisis cabinet, anxious provincial governors began taking the law into their own hands.
In the detached Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, on the Baltic coast between Poland and Lithuania, the Governor, Mr Leonid Gorbenko, declared what he called a "state of emergency", although technically only the President has the right to do this.
A statement from the governor's office called on the people of Kaliningrad, which is roughly 300 miles west of Russia proper, to observe order and not to hoard food.
The state of emergency was aimed at building up a regional reserve of food and fuel, controlling prices and ensuring essential supplies to schools, kindergartens and hospitals.
Similar measures have been taken across the country. In Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, the Governor, Mr Alexander Lebed, announced a freeze on tariffs for gas, petrol, electricity and local transport, and said the prices for locally-produced goods and essential foodstuffs would be controlled by decree.
"By regulating prices, I certainly place myself on the brink of violating the law," the ex-general said yesterday. "But . . . I am determined to prevent starvation in the region.
"Businessmen should understand that I am acting in their interests to prevent a situation in which huge mobs of hungry, angry people take to the streets."
Local price controls have also been introduced in Perm, Novgorod, Smolensk, Omsk and Chuvashia. As the skyrocketing price of food and other essentials forces each of the country's 88 regions to introduce their own mini-economic regimes, inter-regional trade is likely to freeze up, with the extensive network of traffic police posts on regional borders trying to act, as they did in the early 1990s, like customs posts.
In Moscow, one of the few commodities to have held its old price, petrol, went up yesterday. The popular local daily, Moskovsky Komsomolets, launched a front page contest for crisis recipes with a recipe for "crisis cutlets" - boiled macaroni put through a mincer, shaped into patties, fried and sprinkled with a crumbled stock cube.
The rouble drifted downwards again yesterday, to the point where it has lost two thirds of its value in three weeks. By comparison, it took a year for Indonesia's currency to lose 84 per cent.
Commentator Dmitri Kuznets said that whatever government was eventually formed would find itself facing a similar situation to that in 1992. "As of the start of September there's nothing to strengthen, stabilise or reform," he said. "It's back to square one."