Oleg Sapozhkov on the changing roles of government and business in Russia

Major changes in routine processes are rarely noticeable overnight, precisely because they are so commonplace. However, sooner or later it becomes clear: something is happening. Thus, we have been writing for many years about how the executive power in the Russian Federation is being restructured, how it is isolated from regulated industries, increasingly turning into a closed structure that has everything “of its own,” from experts and ideas to big data and a tangle of information systems that they work with them. The latest composition of the government only accelerated this process severalfold due to its technocratic nature: the electronic budget, the State Automated System “Management” and departmental GIS increasingly allow officials to literally manage industries and know about what is happening in them without leaving their offices – and finally close the corporate perimeter of Bely Houses.

This “corporatism” also affected the staffing of the government; it is most visible in it, for example, how the rules work “silent hiring”: if in the 2010s the arrival of a deputy minister “from the market” could mean changes for the industries under his jurisdiction, then in the 2020s this is, as a rule, internal optimization – for a workplace with strict KPIs, a more suitable executor was found within the corporation itself – and tightness its regulations are such that one cannot count on a change in policy. In the 2010s, the executive branch largely copied the practices of large companies and had a common personnel pool with them (transitions from VTB to the Ministry of Economy and back were, for example, the norm). Now the situation looks reversed. Political discourse is gradually penetrating the life of business, turning once capitalist corporations into a “junior partner” of the authorities in fulfilling their goals – in exchange for an uncontrolled redistribution of the domestic market. The spread of the power vertical in the industry is now largely copied by the ecosystems themselves, buying up any promising companies and in the last ten years gradually turning into states within a state with their own IT, financial systems, services, benefits and personnel corridors from a corporate university to an endless series of internal structures, where there is always a place for a manager who is not completely clueless.

Any business that has demonstrated efficiency is integrated into these ecosystems, regardless of price, or “split” in order to maintain independence at the expense of insignificance. In the context of long-term personnel shortages, opportunities to close the internal kitchen, citing the risks of sanctions, as well as the participation of the state as the owner, the competitive advantages of such “ecosystems” are becoming more and more obvious in comparison with SMEs, not to mention medium-sized companies, which are almost non-existent in the Russian Federation . This vertical monopolization is difficult not to notice, but if it worries anyone, it is not the FAS, but the Ministry of Finance and the Federal Tax Service, and only because of taxes on “closed” internal transactions: the question of whether to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s has been resolved quite a long time ago.