Originally posted by udet
and of course, rural areas never had electicity installed in the first place, so no blackouts there...
Well, I have travelled a lot, and really did see some villages in the mountains or taiga that have no electricity. There are some places in "traditionally" power-poor places like Krasnodar region where in some distant villages they have power for 4 hours daily, but they hardly can be called "industrial or population centres".
The State Electrical Network is one of the vital structures, and all the main lines have 3-5 backup levels. They were designed during cold war (thank you guys for your threat since 1946), and were supposed to withstand massive nuclear strikes. So, it's almost impossible to, for example, cut Moscow off from Volga powerstations or central-Russia nuclear powerplants, not even speaking about the fact that we have 14 (fourteen) powerplants in Moscow.
Now the electric network turned into a great "market place" for electrical producers and consumers. For example, when a steel factory builds their own "backup" power station - they sell the unnessesary power to the global network, and this power is delivered to some other place thousand kilometers away where someone needs it. The whole European Russia, Urals and Western Siberia are covered by this net.