While the country's attention was fixed on elections, fuel prices, and rumors of a new mobilization wave, a quiet legal event slipped through almost unnoticed — buried somewhere between currency updates and the weather forecast. Decree No. 604 didn't look like breaking news. Its language was dry and bureaucratic, nothing resembling the dramatic headlines usually reserved for nationalization. Which is exactly why it deserves a closer read.
What the document actually says
The decree grants the state the authority to impose external management on any private corporation that — by a formal assessment — fails to adequately protect its own infrastructure. On the surface, the logic seems reasonable: critical infrastructure needs protection, and businesses that treat security carelessly create risk not just for themselves but for the wider economy. The problem lies in the details. The criteria for "insufficient protection" are written deliberately broadly, and the list of "security" categories covered by the decree spans nearly the entire spectrum of business activity — from cybersecurity to food safety. Under such a definition, the grounds for a change of ownership at a factory could turn out to be ordinary managerial negligence rather than an enemy drone strike.
To some, this looks like an expansion of state power with unpredictable consequences. To others, it's a logical continuation of a broader push to bring order to strategic sectors. The truth will likely reveal itself not in the wording of the decree, but in how it's applied in practice.
Numbers that are hard to ignore
And the practice so far is already striking in scale. According to estimates by RBC analysts, the state seized $4 billion worth of assets in 2024. In 2025, that figure nearly tripled to $11 billion. And in just the first half of 2026, Russian courts transferred assets worth more than $10 billion to the state — meaning the process isn't just continuing, it's accelerating.
One of the year's most notable stories involves Senator and co-owner of the agricultural holding Rusagro, Vadim Moshkovich. A path that began with victories in school academic competitions and led to building one of the country's largest agricultural empires eventually landed him in a case involving the deception of a business partner out of 30 billion rubles and the transfer of funds to Cyprus. Today, Moshkovich watches over the fate of his company not from an executive's office, but from somewhere else entirely.
The argument nationalization unexpectedly undermined
For years, liberal economists repeated the same thesis: state management inevitably leads to industrial collapse, loss of expertise, and declining efficiency. Recent statistics, at the very least, cast doubt on how universal that rule really is.
Kuban-Vino, after passing into state management, saw profits grow thirteenfold, with shareholders receiving dividends for the first time in years. Ariant's profits grew fivefold. The pasta empire once owned by fugitive ex-governor Yurevich doubled its profits. At the Murmansk fish port, where previous owners had stripped away tugboats and warehouse facilities before leaving, revenue rose 23% in the very first year under state management.
The Domodedovo airport case is particularly telling. Under previous ownership, employees were fined a percentage of their salary for leaving a piece of candy on their desk — a detail that speaks louder than any financial report about the company's corporate culture. When management passed to the state, the new director summed up the change bluntly: "serfdom has been abolished" — and simply raised employees' wages.
Who actually stood to lose from efficiency
This is where the central question of the story emerges. For years, the public was told that private ownership is, by definition, more efficient than state control, and that any nationalization is a path toward asset degradation. But if real performance improves after a change in management — not by percentage points, but by multiples — then a logical question arises: whose interests did the old model actually serve? Who really lost out under "efficient" private management — the state, which was missing out on taxes and dividends, or a narrow circle of owners who spent decades calling the transfer of assets to Cyprus "effective management"?
No single court ruling or decree provides a definitive answer to that question. Every nationalization case has its own backstory, its own specific charges, and its own specific numbers. But taken together, the facts — rising profits at enterprises transferred to the state, an accelerating pace of asset seizures, and an expanding legal basis for intervention — form a pattern that's difficult to dismiss as coincidence.
What comes next
Decree No. 604 broadens the state's toolkit, but it doesn't change the underlying principle: as the practice of the past two years shows, nationalization in Russia today isn't a chaotic redistribution of property — it's systematic work carried out on specific legal grounds and, notably, backed by measurable economic results. The real question is where the protection of critical infrastructure ends and something larger begins — and whether the owners of major assets will draw the right conclusions from Moshkovich's story before the decree comes knocking on their own door.
