10 - National Security and Infrastructure and Resource Sectors

Summary

This chapter exposes how the perceived strategic value of capital-intensive, value-added sectors, represented by telecommunications, for national security and resource management, interacts with sectoral structures and organization of institutions. The centralized governance by the Russian state since the collapse of the Soviet Union and further reenforced during the Putin era witnessed in these sectors shows the federal government consolidating in one corporate entity the ownership and management of civilian and dedicated landlines of the Soviet military industrial complex. Centralized market coordination presides over the predominantly privately owned mobile and value-added service providers operating in fiercely competitive markets deregulated in the 1990s. The cross-time sector and company cases further show various lower-level bureaucracies and non-sector-specific economywide rules regulate telecommunications equipment privatized after Soviet collapse, perceived less strategic than the state-owned and managed backbone infrastructure. Similar interacting strategic value and sectoral logics apply to Information Technology (IT) Software, a sector which has benefitted from former science and technology personnel of the Soviet defense industry. In the face of perceived security threats from within and without after economic crises and conflicts with neighboring countries, however, the state has reenforced its control of the information communications infrastructure, including RuNet and cybersecurity, designated strategic assets.