Medvedev's administration is in charge of creating the new party, the Moscow-based newspaper reported today, without saying where it got the information. Anatoly Chubais, first deputy prime minister under the late President Boris Yeltsin, may become a leader of the as yet unnamed party, Trud said.

Vladislav Surkov, Medvedev's first deputy chief of staff and chief political strategist, gave his backing to the creation of the party, Trud said. The party will contest national parliamentary elections in 2011, the newspaper said.

Putin's United Russia controls 70 percent of seats in the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, and dominates government at all levels from the exclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean.

Chubais, the chief architect of Russia's state-asset selloff in the 1990s, now heads state-run Russian Nanotechnologies Corp. In 2004, he quit as co-chairman of the opposition Union of Right Forces party.

Medvedev's new party will be business-oriented, Trud said. The president has made modernization of Russia's oil-dependent economy a priority and repeatedly called for an overhaul of the political system he inherited from Putin, his predecessor in the Kremlin.

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