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This article deals with the path of the ongoing reform in Russia of public institutions, which is central to the public sector as a whole and is inspired by the “new public management” principles. It shows how its initiators, relying on the legacy of the past, try to modify the relationships between actors in all sectors of the public sphere and mobilize them, and how they eventually come to reorient their own initial project because they rightly or wrongly expect resistance of various kinds. Some of these expected sources of resistance are related to the struggle to acquire skills and the defense of territories that structures the federal government, where the fate of this reform will be settled.