As part of his drive to tighten control over Russia's 89 provinces and semi-autonomous ethnic republics, President Vladimir Putin has divided them into seven districts and named a representative to each with broad powers.

The new representatives, chosen mainly from the military, police and ex-KGB security services, have been given seats on the influential advisory Security Council and their territories roughly coincide with Russia's eight military districts.

Following is a list of the new super-regions and the presidential representatives appointed to head them.

1. Central Region. This region includes Moscow, its suburbs and a handful of smaller nearby cities in the heartland of European Russia. Its new chief Georgy Poltavchenko, born in 1953, will be based in Moscow. He was previously head of the tax police in St Petersburg, where Putin was deputy mayor, and is seen as close to the president. His task will be to rein in the most powerful of the regional bosses, Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov.

2. Northwestern Region. This region includes St Petersburg, the Arctic ports Murmansk and Arkhangelsk, as well as the outlying Baltic enclave Kaliningrad. Its boss, Viktor Cherkesov, born 1950, was a deputy head of the FSB, the main domestic successor of the KGB secret police. Before that he ran the regional FSB in St Petersburg, where he will now be based.

3. Volga Region. Liberal former Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko, born 1962, returns to his home town, the once closed industrial city of Nizhny Novgorod, to run this region surrounding the Volga river and the north coast of the Caspian Sea. It includes many of Russia's ethnic semi-autonomous republics, including oil-rich Tatarstan and Bashkortostan.

4. North Caucasus. This restive region includes breakaway Chechnya, where Russia has battled separatist rebels since last October after being defeated in a previous war in 1994-96. It includes the Caucasus mountains, Europe's highest range, and the wide steppes beneath their northern slopes. Ethnic tension has also flared into violence in several other areas of the region, which is one of Russia's poorest. It will be headed by Viktor Kazantsev, born 1946, a tough-talking, four star general who commanded the troops in Chechnya until April. He will be based in Rostov-on-Don.

5. Urals Region. The resource-rich region of the Ural mountains will be headed from Yekaturinburg by Pyotr Latyshev, born 1948, a former deputy interior minister who ran the police in the northwest military district. He is also a former police chief for the Krasnodar province in southern Russia.

6. Siberia Region. Leonid Drachevsky, born 1942, a diplomat who ran the ministry in charge of relations with other ex-Soviet republics in the Commonwealth of Independent States, will run this vast, resource-rich region from Novosibirsk. He has also been deputy foreign minister and ambassador to Poland.

7. Far East. This region includes the Pacific coast, Sakhalin island, the Kamchatka peninsula, the huge, diamond-rich ethnic republic of Yakutia, the port of Vladivostok and the remote Arctic north. Its vast and sparsely populated territory sees frequent power and transport crises that often turn life-threatening in winter. It will be run by Konstantin Pulkovsky, a general who commanded Russian troops during the first Chechen war. He will be based in Khabarovsk, a trading and industrial city just north of the border with China.

MOSCOW, May 31 (Reuters)