The Guardian have reported on a decision by the Russian parliament to allow strategically important energy corporations to amass private armies:

Russia’s parliament voted yesterday to allow the country’s two biggest energy monopolies, Gazprom and the state oil pipeline company Transneft, to employ and arm private security units. Under the deal, Russia’s interior ministry will supply Gazprom with guns from its own armoury.

Supporters of the plan say that Russia’s oil and gas installations - which are key to the country’s boom and burgeoning economic revival - have to be protected from terrorist attack at all cost.

“A couple of terrorist acts and an ensuing ecological catastrophe would be enough to immediately declare Russia an unreliable partner and supplier of energy reserves,” said Alexander Gurov, one of 341 MPs who backed the new law in the country’s 450-seat Duma. [The Guardian]

The Russian government has wielded energy supplies as strategic weapons against its post-soviet neighbours in recent years, leading to nervousness in European governments about the long term stability of their energy supplies. The Guardian article conjures the spectacle of a corporate state in which Putin’s possible move from President to head of Gazprom would be a promotion:

Many observers regard the state-owned energy giant as a state within a state and also the Kremlin’s most brutally effective geopolitical weapon, as well as a tool for bludgeoning the neighbours.

Gazprom has a watertight grip on gas exports: it temporarily severed energy supplies to Belarus in January and to Ukraine last year following a row over prices.

The company has impeccable connections with Russia’s ruling elite, from which it is virtually indistinguishable. The chairman of the board is Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s diminutive first deputy prime minister. There are rumours that Vladimir Putin may take over as head of Gazprom next year when he steps down as president. [The Guardian]

According to Reuters the relaxation in laws refers solely to the oil-pipeline monopoly, Transneft and energy giant Gazprom, which “has 430,000 employees, controls some of Russia’s biggest media outlets, has a firm grip on gas exports and owns the country’s third largest bank” [Reuters]. Putin already has ‘friends’ in Gazprom:

The chief executive of the pipeline consortium is Matthias Warnig, a German who heads Dresdner Bank’s arm in Russia and is a longtime friend of Putin’s. The Wall Street Journal reported this year that Warnig was an officer in the Stasi, the East German secret police, and met Putin during the late 1980s when the Russian president was based in East Germany as a Soviet KGB officer. [Washington Post]

The Washington Post article also reports on the appointment of the former German chancellor, Gerhardt Schroeder as board chairman at Gazprom.

Russian corporate culture (although it seem a little quaint to qualify the phrase with the name of a nation-state) is following an increasing popular corporate path towards militarisation. Walmart’s recent ascendency to the military-retail complex is only amongst the most recent examples of American corporate militarisation.

These latest steps in corporate evolution are an interesting contrast to to the growing privatisation of military functions and the attendant creep of military law. American legislators have, for some time, been concerned about the U.S. government’s deployment of private security contractors in military operations since there is less public accountability for the private organisations. These concerns were raised about the deployment of private contractors in Central America serving the U.S.’ “War on Drugs” and more recently we have seen these same concerns echoed in Iraq. Hasty legislation has been drafted to bring the operations of private security contractors under the uniform code of military justice [Wikipedia]. Some observers regard this legislation to have been so loosely drafted that it brings embedded journalists and other largely civilian functions under military jurisdiction, in which disobeying an order or disrespecting an officer become punishable offences.

The old cold war adversaries present us with an intriguing pincer movement on civil law. On the one hand the creep of military law into civil arenas where states remain strong, and on the other the creep of corporate law into military arenas where the state is weak.

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