Russia Against Modernity

In Russia, Zelensky's peers were a lost generation. Educated during the decade of decline in the 1990s, they felt resent­ment towards their more successful predecessors among the boomers. Mikhail Anipkin, a Russian-British sociologist, compared the Russian political life of the pre-war period to a theater: Born in the 1950s, the boomers occupied the stage and performed their endless play. In the wings were the mil- lennials born in the 1980s, helplessly waiting for their turn on stage. Uninterested, generation X - the lost people born in the 1970s - drank at the bar. The youngsters from the most recent generation whistled in protest, but the babushka ushers kicked them out.²

The unbearable lightness of Western pundits

Putin's invasion of Ukraine shocked and confused the world. Even naming the event posed a problem. Declaring his war on Ukraine on the night of February 24, 2022, Putin did not once use the word "war" and barely mentioned Ukraine. Instead, he informed the world that he begun "a special military opera­tion." Wars have their laws and customs - Putin's operation had none. The collective voice of the West chose to call it "the Russian invasion of Ukraine." But the Ukrainians fought a very real war, and Ukraine had as much agency as Russia. This equality should be reflected in the concept. My choice of denomination is the Russo-Ukrainian War (2014-?), which evokes the Russo-Japanese (1904-5) and Russo-Polish (1919­21) wars - both lost by Russia.

Putin knew perfectly well that he was starting a war, but he hoped his "special operation" label would function as a stealthy conceptual weapon, passing undetected on public radars. Clearly, he was mistaken. Russia's barbaric war brought global condemnation and Ukraine got the help it needed. At first, however, some leading voices described Ukraine as a failed state and a sort of strategic nuisance, one that had been med­dling in the affairs of the real players. Prejudice, ignorance and material interests were all in evidence at this point.

On the day of invasion, Christian Lindner, the powerful German minister of finance, told the Ukrainian ambassador to his country that Kyiv would fall the next day; the ambas­sador, Andrij Melnyk, tried to argue, then wept. A few weeks later, Lindner was swearing that Germany would never stop supporting Ukraine.³ Adam Tooze, an economic historian at Columbia University, wrote in January 2022: "What makes Ukraine into the object of Russian power is not just its geog­raphy, but the division of its politics, the factional quality of its elite and its economic failure."⁴ In other countries, com­petition within the elite is called democracy - why did the Ukrainian elite have to be monolithic? Ukraine's economic growth during the post-Soviet decades was three times lower than Russia's, Tooze stated. He failed to mention that Russia's growth was secured by fossil fuels that polluted the world and Ukraine's by the labor of its farmers and IT workers. In the era of the Anthropocene, applauding the superiority of oil and gas revenues was a little shortsighted. If Russia showed strong economic growth and Ukraine did not, did that confirm the superiority of Russia or discredit the indicators of growth?

A week before the invasion, Katrina vanden Huevel, the influential publisher of The Nation magazine, suggested that "Ukraine is the closest thing Europe has to a failed state." She claimed (wrongly) that three American presidents had refused to provide military support to Ukraine because it "was not worth defending." Finally, she proposed "a deal that guaran­tees Ukraine's sovereignty and independence in exchange for guaranteeing its neutrality,"⁵ forgetting that Ukraine had already given up its nuclear weapons and acquired sovereignty and independence thirty years earlier - all guaranteed by the United States, Russia and other countries.

In his well-informed book on the subject, Thane Gustafson, professor at Georgetown University, analyzed the likely impact of the energy transition on Russia's economy. In the early 2030s, Russia's exports of oil, gas and coal would decline sharply, and by 2050 its total exports would be reduced by half.⁶ This is a bleak picture, wrote Gustafson, "a major turning point for Russia." Gustafson published his book just a year before the war. What he predicted for 2050 occurred in 2022, and the causality was different: it was not climate action that caused the fall in Russian exports, but Russian aggression that accelerated the global transition.

Predictions differ from explanations, and prophets from scholars. In times of war, predictions materialize quickly enough for people to remember them and judge their authors. In January 2022, Niall Ferguson, a popular historian, compared Putin to Peter I, the founder of the Russian Empire. Like Peter, Putin would win his own battle of Poltava, Ferguson wrote. Russia's imperial history, he speculated, "inspires today's Tsar Vladimir ... much more than the dark chapters of Stalin's reign of terror." Indeed, a couple of months later, Putin pub­licly compared himself to Peter I. Ferguson understood Putin but failed to understand his war. Ignoring Russia's economic and demographic problems and believing in its easy victory, Ferguson stated that Ukraine would "receive no significant military support from the West." Putin would win his war, and Ferguson his punchline: "Do not be surprised if [Putin's] victory parade takes place in Poltava," he wrote just before the invasion.⁷ As the war turned into a major disappointment for Putin's admirers, Ferguson was less bullish: "What makes history so hard to predict... is that most disasters come out of left field," he wrote in early March. Whether left field or right, the historian reaffirmed his license: "The language people

speak in the corridors of power... is not economics or politics. It is history." Thus, Ferguson predicted that Mariupol would fall in a few days, Biden's administration would not support Ukraine, and since most Russian leaders died of natural causes, so would Putin.⁸ We know that at least some of his predictions did not come true. There was definitely no parade in Poltava.

In June 2022, John Mearsheimer, professor at the University of Chicago, stated that the reason for Putin's war was the threat posed by NATO: if Ukraine joined, Russia would suffer "existentially," and this justified Russia's actions.⁹ A month or two passed, and this "political realism" was refuted by real poli­tics. Finland and Sweden joined NATO because of Putin's war. With their accession, NATO was much closer to Russia's vital centers than it would have been had Ukraine ever succeeded with its application to join the alliance. Any "realist" could have seen this was about to happen, but not Mearsheimer.

This chain of events is a great example of political nemesis.' Putin was so afraid of NATO that he ending up bringing it to the gates of his hometown of St. Petersburg. The same tale of nemesis unfolded with the gas pipelines. Putin wanted his gas to bypass Ukraine so much that he built two hugely expensive pipelines under the Baltic Sea. One was completed but did not become operational because of the war, while the other was barely functioning. In September 2022, somebody - maybe the Russians, maybe their enemies - blew up both pipelines. In the meantime, Russian gas kept flowing through Ukraine.

Whatever the false predictions, the Ukrainians were valiant on the battlefield and artful in diplomacy. Blending his political and theatrical skills, President Zelensky produced a daily show in his capital, bestowing popularity on some Western leaders and refusing hospitality to others. From a nonplace that once required the article "the" as if it had no proper name, Ukraine had turned into the political center of the world.

The future is like a Rorschach inkblot: people respond to uncertainty by projecting their desires onto it. Neither pundits

nor prophets know the future, but those who predict it reveal themselves. There is no worse mistake for pundits than to make the wrong predictions during a war. We learn of their desires, and they are laughable.

Germany's Finlandization

Curiously, the "realists" launched a project of Finlandizing Ukraine at the very moment Finland abandoned its special relations with Russia. First put forward in 1961 by the German historian Richard Lowenthal, the concept of Finlandization was the logical conclusion of Cold War realpolitik. After the Winter War with the Soviet Union (1939-40) and World War II, Finland lost one fifth of its industry and more than a tenth of its population. Having accepted a partial demili­tarization, Finland became the Soviet Union's largest trade partner. Astonishingly, it also accepted various forms of Soviet control that even included the censorship of books in Finnish public libraries. Later, the Soviet Union added carrots to sticks, offering guaranteed prices for Russian oil and buying Finnish products in a process that resembled barter.¹⁰ In the 1960s, these exchanges developed into a jointly administered "ruble clearing account": transactions could be made as long as total trade balanced in each five-year period. In the 1980s, falling oil prices weakened this barter system and caused an economic crisis in Finland. The country found that its technologies were obsolete and its banks non-competitive, and that even its farms were failing in the European market.

Something similar happened in Germany with the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War. The country had been developing its imports and exports in line with the Wandel durch Handel ("change through trade") principle. Some Germans called this idea Kantian, but it was mercantilist; more importantly, it never worked. When the British Empire sold opium to China, or the

US sold grain to the Soviet Union, they made lots of money but saw little progress in their partners. Clearly, the energy trade with Russia was profitable for Germany, but why did they see cancelling it as a full-scale catastrophe? It was only trade, after all; if it relied on competitive prices, then one trading partner could be replaced by another. But the prices Russia set for Germany were not competitive. Insulated from the global market by fixed pipelines and long-term contracts, German corporations received big discounts, which grew even bigger every time prices went up. These accumulated discounts were so significant that in April 2022 German businesses warned that the termination of Russian trade would lead to inflation, recession and a trade deficit. Deutsche Bank estimated that the losses would amount to $220 billion, a sum larger than the much-discussed German trade surplus in 2021.¹¹ Like Finland in the 1970s and Ukraine in the 2000s, Germany in the 2010s was resource-dependent by proxy.

Neither German industry nor the global public recognized that the reason for the country's surplus had been cheap Russian gas; everyone preferred to talk about the efficiency of its banks and the productivity of its workers. In fact, these workers were underpaid and the infrastructure decaying, but German industrialists continued to channel their surpluses elsewhere.¹² In a resource-bound country, as we have seen, financial results do not depend on the population or infra­structure, and the money does not return to the people or the land.

The Russian pipelines insulated German businesses from the outside world, with its gaiamodern challenges of decarbon­ization and authoritarianism. Enjoying access to the pipelines, the German flagships of technical progress were making guar­anteed profits based on low energy costs, stability of supplies and long-term planning. This was particularly significant when global markets were in turmoil, as they often had been over the previous two decades. The historical experience of Finland helps us to understand these new facts of European life. Extending the Soviet practice of Finlandizing its neighbors, the Russo-German energy trade was closer to a barter clear­ing system than to a free market. Russia's dominance in this trade was overwhelming. It owned not only the Siberian gas, but also the pipelines on land and under the sea, and even the gas reservoirs on German territory. Despite Germany's success in developing renewable energy sources, these paleomodern structures blocked its adjustment to the new modernity of the Anthropocene.

Genocide and fetishism

What's worse, malice or mismanagement? The correct answer is, a mismanaged malice. Though the military aspects of the war were badly mismanaged by the Russian authorities, its genocidal aspects were preplanned and intentional. Russian actions in Ukrainian cities and villages included mass murders and deportations combined with the intentional destruction of cultural objects and institutions (monuments, museums, theaters, etc.), educational facilities and history textbooks. This is what Raphael Lemkin, who studied in Lviv and watched how the Soviets engineered famine in fertile Ukraine, called barbarity and vandalism; in 1944, he named this combination "genocide."¹³ As he wrote, "genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppres­sor."¹⁴ He continued by saying that the oppressed group could be either exterminated or allowed to remain on the land. The latter we would call "colonization." In both its variations, external and internal, colonization often led to mass murder.¹⁵ But there is a catch. In most cases of colonization, the oppressor and the oppressed were separated by various distances and differences - geographical, racial, economic, cultural, religious, linguistic, etc. These differences shaped the patterns of imperial governance. Perceived differences in the color of skin provided grounds for racism. Differences in economic and technological development made the empire militarily superior and capable of exploiting the colonies. Many of these differences were constructed by the colonizers in their interest, while others were real and accessible to inde­pendent observation. Historians found such situations in the genocidal actions committed against the natives of America or Siberia, or in the imperial wars in Africa and Asia. In the long and tortured history of Russo-Ukrainian relations, perceived differences were in short supply. Even the aggressor had a hard time putting his finger on them.¹⁶

Where two "national patterns" are not that dissimilar, mark­ers of difference between them can be artificially constructed: if not languages, then dialects and accents; if not different religions, then different costumes or fashions; if not skin color, then different ways of cutting hair or shaving beards. These minor differences then grow into fetishes: they become more important than the bigger and more profound similarities, and come to define life or death. There is no genocide without dis­tinct "national patterns," but the fetishized differences between those patterns would be negligible for any other purpose than genocide. There is a fetish beneath any genocide.

In the Bible there is a story about how the Gileadites fought against a neighboring people, the Ephraimites. Those Ephraimites who fled and were captured had to pass a pho­netic test - pronouncing the Hebrew word "Shibboleth." For saying "Sibboleth" instead, forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed (Judges 12:5-6). Citing this story, Victor Shklovsky, the Russian-Jewish scholar who took part in World War I and saw its aftermath in Ukraine, commented: "The Bible repeats itself in a curious way ... In the Ukraine [s/c!] I saw a Jewish boy. He could not look at the corn without trembling. He told me: When they were killing us in the Ukraine they needed to check whether the person they were about to kill was Jewish. They asked him: 'Say kukuruza (corn).' Sometimes, he said: Kukuruzha. They killed him."¹⁷

There is not much difference between this use of phonet­ics and the Nazi method of identifying Jews by circumcision: obviously neither of these markers warrant murder. Other genocides followed the same logic of identifying minor differ­ences. Historians know that the Armenian genocide of 1915-17 and the Bosnian genocide of 1995 cannot be explained by reli­gious hostilities between Muslims and Christians. The Young Turks - mostly intellectuals and military officers - who came to power in the Ottoman Empire in 1908 aimed to secularize their country. At the outset of their campaign, the Armenian radicals - also secular intellectuals and military officers - sup­ported the Young Turks and took part in their movement. There had been no genocide throughout the long centuries during which Turks and Armenians lived side by side in sepa­rate religious communities; the genocide only occurred after their religious differences had been mostly eliminated.

The internal terror in the Soviet Union, which spanned three decades and only ended with Stalin's death in 1953, was equiva­lent to genocide even though the perpetrators and the victims often belonged to the same ethnicity and class and shared the same ideology. It even happened that an interrogator would be arrested and then meet one of his former victims in the same camp. For Bosnians and Serbs in the late twentieth century, their religious and cultural differences did not play the role they played in the past.¹⁸ The same could safely be said about the Russians and Ukrainians when they lived side by side - in both Russia and Ukraine - before the disastrous war of 2022.

The absence of meaningful differences does not decrease the scale or the cruelty of the mass murder. On the contrary, the lesser the differences the greater the genocide. The smaller the chosen differences are, the more the genocide approaches a collective suicide. Indeed, this analogy with suicide has been noted in many historiographies of genocide, from Somalia and Cambodia to the Soviet Union and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In Civilization and its Discontents Sigmund Freud wrote: "it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other ... I gave this phenomenon the name of the 'narcissism of minor differences,' a name that does not do much to explain it."¹⁹ The latter is probably true, but I see something valuable in Freud's idea. If people are perceived as different, they can be used and abused, and the abuse would be seen in terms of economics rather than politics. If you treat another person (or animal) as a means, then they will usually be a creature very different from you, and it is this difference that allows you to maintain this instrumental relation; but if you see another person as an end, then this person will prob­ably be similar to you, and evoke either love or hatred. Political relations emerge among those who are similar.

Attempting to make sense of the Balkan genocides, Canadian historian Michael Ignatieff invoked this old Freudian concept of minor differences.²⁰ Narcissism turned small differences into grand narratives, which then led to mass murder. This does not, however, explain why and how two neighboring and simi­lar peoples become a genocidal couple. Many human groups are similar, but this does not lead them to kill one another. Genocide does not function as a causal chain of events that starts with a small difference and ends with a mass grave. The opposite is true. Mass murders happen for reasons that have nothing to do with ethnic differences, big or small. But after they have taken place, the survivors on both sides explain the slaughter by converting their small, negligible differences into grand, overwhelming narratives.

There are multiple differences between human groups, and the number of small differences is infinite. Looking at racial differences, Critical Race Theory deconstructs them by arguing that they have no objective referents - they are all created by cultural perceptions. One could say that Critical Race Theory works as an exact antidote to the "narcissism of small differ­ences": the former turns big differences, as they are perceived in racist society, into minor collaterals of cultural interactions; the latter turns small differences into decisive factors that, for a murderous group, determine the difference between life and death. There is no "objective" metric that could define which differences are small (e.g. accents) and which differences are big (races or generations). They are all constructed, contingent and fluid. In the way of structuration, political agency can turn any set of human differences into a genocidal matter.

According to Lemkin, the reason for genocide is the oppres­sors' striving to establish their own order in the occupied lands. The murderers want to get power, property and recognition from their own kind and from neighboring peoples. Differences are in the eyes of the beholder, but if one person has power he can impose his perception on others. Putin, his state and his army were determined to destroy the "national pattern" of the Ukrainians and replace it with the "national pattern" of the Russians. The perceived differences were small, but the politi­cal results were enormous. In some ways the Russians and the Ukrainians were so similar that no Shibboleth test would have differentiated them. But in other ways they were vastly differ­ent. The striking difference between the generations in power was, from Putin's perspective, impossible to acknowledge. The Russians and Ukrainians are the same people, Putin said on the eve of his assault in 2022. To identify the enemy amongst a people who looked and sounded like themselves, the Russian soldiers couldn't rely even on accents - many of them had simi­lar ways of pronouncing Russian words. Having no other clue, the Russian soldiers on the checkpoints searched people for "Nazi tattoos" - anyone who had anything interpretable as such on their skin was beaten or killed. And those who sent these soldiers to Ukraine developed their own marks of difference.

The story of Z

The war against Ukraine was as senseless as any other geno­cide: it could not bring Russia any political or economic gain, and it did not. It was only comprehensible within a frame­work combining classic Russian imperialism with a specifically post-Soviet revanchism. But there was also a third element to the mix: fetishism. The Russian losses were huge and predict­able, but they did not matter. What mattered was the fetish: a Ukrainian territory whose only value came from the idea that it used to be "ours" and should be regained. Supposedly, this would have brought glory, ecstasy or some other form of satisfaction to the Russian president, his elite and their people.

Nobody understands a fetishistic desire but the fetishist. Moreover, different fetishists don't understand each other: one worships a heel and another an elbow. However, fetish­ism is a venerable concept; both Marx and Freud loved it. Why does anyone take pleasure from the proverbial heel? It's incomprehensible, and the victim, the owner of the heel, is as dumbfounded as anyone else. None of this matters to the fetishist; he seeks pleasure above all else. It is exactly this disproportion between a part and a whole that constitutes fetishism. Crimea was such a heel and so was the Donbas. In national catastrophes of this scale, there is always this irrational, incomprehensible core. German historians of the Holocaust call it a "civilizational rupture." It is important to analyze imperialism and revanchism, two comprehensible sources of both catastrophes, but it would be wrong to see in them the whole picture. Your foe, the fetishist, would be happy to deceive you in this way.

Militant and potentially genocidal, fetishist culture is full of contradictions. When the emperor is a fetishist his poets write odes and his sculptors erect monuments to the fetish. This is hardly surprising given that the fetishist pays them hand­somely. Being a scholar under fetishistic rule is more difficult.

Precisely because the fetishistic aspect of events is incompre­hensible, the scholar mostly writes about their imperialistic and revanchist aspects. Historically speaking, many scholars who lived under fetishistic regimes were imperialists, but very few were fetishists. For various reasons, they did not approve of worship of the heel, and wrote critically about it. Most of them attempted to explain events as the product of comprehensible factors, either political or military; fetishism was subsumed within imperialism. It took courage to see brutal acts of geno­cide for what they were: senseless.

A mysterious feature of the Russo-Ukrainian War was the aggressor's use of the letter Z. At the very start of the invasion, it appeared on Russian tanks and other vehicles. Used as a symbol of war and a sign of support, the letter Z spread all over Russia. Patriots painted it on police cars, on the sides of buildings and on their clothing. In Kazan, children who were dying in a hospice were lined up in a Z formation for a macabre photo that was widely disseminated by state media. The war was being fought against the West - why then was a Latin letter, foreign to the Cyrillic alphabet, chosen as its symbol? Since there was no official explanation, the theories multiplied. Some said that the Z came from the Russian word zapad, which means "the west"; others said it stood for Zelensky and that Russian troops had been ordered to kill him. True believ­ers saw in the Z one half of the swastika, which they claimed was an ancient symbol of the Slavs. Critics thought it was taken from zombie films. Whatever the truth, in the spring and summer of 2022 the Latin Z proliferated throughout Russian life and media.

There is a fetish beneath every genocide: circumcised flesh, the pronunciation of certain words, a tattoo. None of them jus­tifies murder, and only a fetishist would disagree with this. But we know that the fetishization of such minor differences took place, and it cost millions of lives. With the Z, this spectacle of history took another step: since there were no words that could serve to differentiate friends from foes, a symbol had to be invented from scratch. Though entirely senseless, belief in the Z, love for the Z, identification with the Z, would identify a true patriot.

Putin's speech that launched the war

While the oppressor carries out his horrible acts indepen­dently of all reason, he is still committed to explaining himself to various audiences. The perpetrators do not justify their acts to their victims, but they do offer justifications to audiences at home and abroad. Here the choice of rhetorical formulas and tropes is important. With his collectivization program Stalin transformed the condition of the Ukrainian peasantry, which he saw as individualist and profit-centered, into the communi­tarian, ascetic and bureaucratic order of the "collective farm." For Putin, it was more difficult to decide upon a rhetorical strategy: first, there was no ideology to speak of, no under­standing of the desired transformation; second, he had already declared that Russians and Ukrainians were one and the same people. How to organize a genocide when the new pattern was indistinguishable from the old?

Rhetorical strategies were available to Putin in the form of four genocidal tropes: 1) presenting the captured territory as terra nullius, a virgin land with no people or pattern to speak of; 2) presenting the current genocide as a symmetrical response to a previous genocide committed by the other side; 3) distorting the memory of the previous pattern so that the imposed order could be presented as new and different; and finally, 4) denigrating the previous order and stretching the perceived differences so that the planned changes would match the declared ambitions. These tropes are logically different, but they could be combined for practical purposes. In more tradi­tional terms, each of them portrays the oppressed population in its own way. Respectively, they involve 1) denial, 2) revenge, 3) amnesia and 4) defamation.

Usually, efforts to deny, explain and justify a mass murder begin after it has taken place, but this time they started before or during the event itself. Putin's speech on February 24, 2022, screened as the war began, was an instance of such preemptive justification.²¹ Guided missiles followed immediately after the broadcast. Pre-recorded, it was choreographed as the starting point of a quick assault, the success of which was considered a certainty by both the speaker and most of his listeners: the declaration of a war which the very people who believed vic­tory to be certain were forbidden to call a 'war'.

The first half of Putin's speech was not about Ukraine at all. He discussed global history - World War II, NATO expansion and the "redivision of the world" that came with the end of the Soviet Union. The first specific topic Putin addressed was the NATO bombing of Belgrade, "a bloody military operation"; interestingly, he also avoided calling it a "war," employing instead the same elusive trope of "special military operation" he used for his own attack on Ukraine. Although "some Western colleagues [had] preferfed] to forget it," the bombing of Belgrade was lodged in Putin's memory so well that he used it to justify the bombing of Kyiv. He also described in detail the wars in Syria, Iraq and Libya, as well as related policies of the United States. The first half of his speech read not as a declara­tion of war on Ukraine but as a long and tedious lecture on US interventions in Europe and Africa. Ukraine was absent from the picture. The values the US had supposedly been aggres­sively imposing upon Russia were said to be "directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they [were] contrary to human nature." Putin was effectively declaring war against the US and its allies, not against Ukraine. Ukraine was not even a proxy: it did not exist, it was a terra nullius. The US, said Putin, "sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us." This is Lemkin's definition in reverse. Initiating his genocide, Putin presented it as a case of victims taking revenge for a previous genocide, this one alleg­edly committed by the US against Russia. Ukraine was still not in the picture.

In the middle of the speech, Putin stated that the US had recently "crossed the red line" with threats against "the very existence of our state and its sovereignty." Only in this part of his speech did he explicitly mention genocide and Ukraine. "We had to stop that atrocity, that genocide of the millions of people who live [in Donbas]." This claim was outlandish: there were never millions of Russians in the Donbas region and no genocide ever took place there. But Putin repeated the claim again, now explaining the purpose of his operation: "to protect people who, for eight years now, have been facing humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kiev regime ... to demilita­rize and denazify Ukraine." The Russians and the Ukrainians are essentially the same, but some Ukrainians are Nazis and therefore different. But the Ukrainians have no agency; they have literally done nothing in this speech. The Americans had turned their Ukrainian friends into Nazis, the opposite of the Russians, who defeated Nazism and disliked the Americans.

Thus, Putin's speech proceeded from 1) terra nullius to 2) preemptive accusations of genocide to 3) distorting memories of the initial condition through historical manipulation to 4) exaggerating the extent of the ethnic difference and so of the required change. At the end of his speech, Putin reiterated his denials and euphemisms: "The current events have nothing to do with a desire to infringe on the interests of Ukraine ... They are connected with the defense of Russia from those who have taken Ukraine hostage." If Ukraine's national pattern had already been destroyed by the American-led genocide, the forthcoming Russian genocide would purge this Americanized pattern. Russia would rescue the true Ukrainian condition from all contaminations, replacing what was different with that which was similar.

Triangulating the differences by referencing the alleged American degradation of Ukraine was Putin's solution to the problem of small differences. His speech slid from the idea that there were no differences between the Russian and the Ukrainian national patterns to the idea that there were polar differences between them. But since these differences were the result of foreign influence, they could be purged for the sake of the original sameness. This state of unity was hidden, but it was the only true state. Those who had no agency could be killed without further notice. The survivors would return to their initial condition, in which Russians and Ukrainians were the same people. Others would have to die to redeem their "degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature."

Defederating Russia

The Russian Empire disintegrated at the end of an imperialist war. The Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War. What would happen to the Russian Federation? The answer was obvious, even if it saddened many.

I am not calling for the collapse of the Russian Federation. I am predicting it, which is by no means the same thing. Even for people like me, who looked forward to Ukraine's total victory and to seeing Russia's rulers tried at an international court, it was not easy to admit that the Russo-Ukrainian War spelled the end of the country. The collapse of this composite state had long been feared, but the Russian rulers succeeded in freezing their domain for a while. Reflecting this central concern of the regime, the ruling party went by the name "United Russia." Navalny called it "the party of crooks and thieves," but the name these people chose for their party articulated their fear of disintegration and lack of other values. They had a chance: a favorable economic situation and a competent government could have staved off the collapse. Their failure was not the work of foreign peoples or governments; before the war, Western governments had been the best allies of a "United Russia."

The era of empires was long gone. Russia called itself a fed­eration, like Germany or Switzerland, but it was behaving like an empire in decline. Federations are defined by the free acces­sion and secession of their members; Brexit is a good example. In contrast to historic empires such as Austria-Hungary, the USSR had a constitutional mechanism permitting its dissolu­tion. The principle of self-determination was adopted by the Bolsheviks in November 1917 and enshrined in the Soviet con­stitution. The same formula of self-determination became the founding principle of the League of Nations, and later of the United Nations. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, "the right of self-determination, including secession" disappeared from Russian constitutional texts. The principle, however, had not been forgotten.

Composite states and federations bring an added value to their peoples, a federative premium. Pursuing economy of scale and a politics of synergy, it is possible to keep this premium positive. This should be the central concern of any composite state, such as the European Union, the United Kingdom or Russia. In a parasitic petrostate that functions as a logistical hub for trading and redistributing its natural resources, the federative premium is negative (see Chapter 3). Political tradi­tion, historical mythology or the imperial domination of one ethnicity over others can defer the collapse of this unproduc­tive formation. Empires and federations develop in peace, consolidate in war and disintegrate after defeat. It would be better for them to remain pacifist like Switzerland, but they tend to be aggressive like Russia. In the way of nemesis, the wars they start are likely to be suicidal.

In describing this process, I prefer the term "defederation" to the more commonly used "decolonization," because the former implies a transformation of all parts of the composite state while the latter applies only to colonies and doesn't refer to the metropolitan core of the empire.¹ There was nothing pre­determined in the process: if Russia had not invaded Ukraine it would probably have deferred or avoided its defederation. But revanchism proved stronger than caution, and fetishism stronger than reason.

Russian imperialism

As an empire, Russia emerged on the international stage at the same time as the early Portuguese and Spanish empires, grew in competition with great terrestrial powers such as Austria and China, matured in a race with the British and French maritime empires, and outlived most of them. In the seventeenth century, Moscow colonized the Urals and Siberia. In the eighteenth century, it annexed the Baltic lands, the Crimea, parts of Poland, and Alaska. In the nineteenth century, it took Finland, the Caucasus, parts of the Balkans, and Central Asia. Externally aggressive, the Russian Empire was a threat to revolutionary France and enlightened Prussia, to British India and Spanish California. Internally oppressive, the Empire crushed a major mutiny in the Urals, sparked several revolts in Poland, unleashed a permanent rebellion in the Caucasus, and confronted violent revolutions in its capitals.

The Empire was deeply integrated in European politics. Russian soldiers took Berlin in 1760, Paris in 1814 and Budapest in 1848, but they did not do it alorte; every time, the Russian Empire was part of an international coalition. Founded as a military capital, St. Petersburg was also a center of diplomacy. Famous diplomats served there - Joseph de Maistre, John Quincy Adams, Bismarck... After the victory over Napoleon, Russian diplomats created the Holy Alliance, a first attempt to integrate Europe by marrying military prowess to conserva­tive ideology. Always a hyperactive player, the Russian Empire extended its Big Games to Central Asia, North America and the Middle East.

The closest historical analogy to the Russo-Ukrainian War of 2022 is the Crimean War of 1853-56, which was lost by Russia. In his wartime dispatches to The New-York Daily Tribune, Karl Marx wrote that "a certain class of writers" attributed to the Emperor of Russia, Nicolas I, "extraordinary powers of mind, and especially of that far-reaching, comprehensive judgement which marks the really great statesman. It is difficult to see how such illusions could be derived."² Russia was never as isolated in its fight against modernity as in these two wars. In both, the Russian army's logistics were poor, its weapons obsolete, its morale low, and the generation gap between its soldiers and their political masters tremendous. In both, the anti- Russian coalition was stronger, though its aims were vague. In both, Russia's disinformation split Western pundits. As Marx wrote, "a lot of reports, communications, etc., are nothing but ridiculous attempts on the part of the Russian agents to strike a wholesome terror into the Western world."³ Both wars chal­lenged the internal structure of the Russian imperial state, and both led to a swift transition of power from the fathers to the sons, or even the granddaughters. In both, ethnic issues were important but not decisive. Close to the end of the Crimean War, the British government discussed a plan for a "war of nations," which would have involved supporting nationalist movements in the Caucasus and elsewhere so that the Russian Empire could be weakened and dismembered. The plan never came to fruition as the government in London fell, and Nicolas I died (or took his own life) at just the right time to not have to acknowledge his defeat. The new British government signed a toothless peace with the heir to the throne, Alexander II. He launched the Great Reforms of the 1860s - still the most successful attempt at modernizing Russia.

All Russian and Soviet reincarnations of the ancient Muscovite state were imperialist, but their successes were not consistent. For every expansionist tsar or commissar like Catherine II or Putin, there was a leader who presided over the contraction of the Empire's domains: Alexander II sold Alaska, Lenin withdrew from Finland and Ukraine, and Gorbachev gave away much more. None of them liked this part of the job, but I am not sure that matters. While imperial victories con­solidated the conservatism of the state, military defeats led to reforms and revolutions. The Great Reforms followed defeat in the Crimean War; the revolution of 1905 followed defeat in the Russo-Japanese War; the two revolutions of 1917 responded to the catastrophe of World War I; and the dismembering of the Soviet Union in 1991 concluded the Cold War. The Soviet collapse led to the liberation of fifteen countries, including Ukraine and Russia. It was a great example of the peaceful transformation of an empire, and part of the success story of global decolonization. However, the Russian loss of territory was smaller than that experienced by the British or even the German empires when they lost their colonies. The large-scale violence that tends to accompany the end of empires was only deferred.

Revanchism

The word "Ukraine" means "the edge." Over the centuries, Ukraine's lands and peoples both absorbed Russian expan­sionism and limited it. A central target of Russia's colonizing efforts, Ukraine was forced to supply the Empire with its goods, services and cadres. While the Ukrainian Cossacks rebelled against Russian rule, the Ukrainian nobility participated in running the Empire, and Cossack strongmen were included in the imperial elite. Ruled from its distant corner, St. Petersburg, the Empire was ambitious and unstable. Its new Crusades to capture Istanbul, Jerusalem or Manchuria fueled Russia's military efforts up until World War I. With the Bolshevik revolution, the renamed empire lost some peripheric lands but preserved its core. The move of the capital to Moscow, the creation of the Soviet Union and its victory in World War II gave new energies to imperial expansion. After the war, the Soviet Union annexed parts of Bukovina, Eastern Prussia, the Baltic countries and Tuva. Parts of Ukraine and Moldova, and parts of the Pacific coast, changed their status more than once. Throughout the twentieth century, the Russian borders shifted almost as often as the most unsettled parts of the global South.

In 1991, as a newly independent country, Russia adopted a new constitution and dismantled the old power structures. Like the metropolitan center of any collapsed empire, Moscow experienced massive problems, including the loss of traditional markets, the disruption of supply chains and the frustration of the elite. At that point of bifurcation, Russia had two strategic options. The first was postcolonial development, which would have seen Russia bid final farewell to the Soviet state in exactly the same way the Ukrainians or Estonians did. A revolution had taken place and the new Russian laws, leaders and institu­tions had nothing in common with their Soviet predecessors. In this narrative, Russia was a colony of the Soviet Union in the same way as Latvia or Uzbekistan were. But this new country, post-Soviet Russia, was still a composite state. There was no reason to expect that, left to themselves, the constitu­ent parts of the former empire such as Chechnya, Tatarstan or the oil-rich parts of Western Siberia would maintain their loyalty to Moscow. Left to its postcolonial humbleness, Russia would need to accept further splits and secessions. Indeed, local protests and rebellions began immediately after 1991. The other option was a continuation of the imperial narra­tive in which the Russian state was the exclusive heir to the Soviet Union: the survivor of a "geopolitical catastrophe," as Putin put it, the target of a global conspiracy and a bulwark against the apocalypse. One option was a decolonization of Russia, the other a reconquest of the original Soviet space. The former would promise peace and prosperity, the latter war and revanchism.

The choice was soon made. Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000 with the promise of suppressing a major rebel­lion in the Caucasus. Two bloody and wasteful Chechen wars (1994-96 and 1999-2009) undermined the project of democracy-building in Russia. Putin pressed further, depriv­ing the constituent parts of the Federation of their sovereign powers (2013) and invading Georgia (2008) and Crimea (2014). With every imperial endeavor, Putin consolidated his personal rule. A basic truth of imperialism is that external expansion and internal oppression are connected like two sides of a coin.

In 1993, Galina Starovoitova warned about the dangers of a "Weimar Russia" - defeated, revanchist and crumbling. As she put it, "the secession of smaller republics would be less problematic for Russia than any attempt to keep such lands by force."⁴ Five years later, Starovoitova, a brilliant ethnographer and arguably the most successful female politician in post- Soviet Russia, was murdered by a political assassin.

The biggest country in the world, the Russian Federation was "the subaltern empire," the "red mirror" of global trou­bles, a "failed state" on the brink of rupture.⁵ Reconquering the Caucasus and Crimea that had belonged to the Soviet Union, the new Russia increasingly identified with Soviet might and glory. Each step towards reconquering Ukraine was a major step towards restoring the Soviet Empire. Unlike classical imperialism, which sought new lands and adventures, Putinism was a revanchism - a less common but particularly toxic kind of imperialism.

On its enormous territory, populated rarely and unevenly, the Russian Federation was fragile. Its population density, nine persons per square kilometer, was comparable to that of Finland or Canada. In these vast northern countries, people congregate in a small number of habitable nooks, leaving other areas thinly settled.⁶ In the post-Soviet era of expen­sive transportation and relatively open borders, people toured and traded in adjacent lands more than in national centers. The men and women of Konigsberg (Kaliningrad) had better opportunities for studying, working or finding a partner in Poland or Germany than in central Russia. The same was true for the millions living in the agglomerations of Southern Siberia: they had better chances of getting on in life in China or Mongolia than in Russia. The Caucasus traded and prayed with Turkey, the White Sea coast traded with Norway, and St. Petersburg with Finland and northern Europe. Moscow was booming while the provinces were looking elsewhere. The very size of the country facilitated its disintegration.

In May 2022, during the third month of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the BBC Russian service produced an instructive study. Exploring data from eleven cemeteries with fresh military graves, the journalists identified more than 3,000 Russian sol­diers killed in Ukraine and listed their hometowns. The results were stunning: the soldiers came from distant regions of Russia, and a majority of them were of non-Russian ethnicity. Dagestan suffered most of the losses, Buryatia ranked second, the Volgograd region third, followed by Bashkortostan and Southern Siberia. These were the poorest areas in the Russian Federation, plagued with high unemployment. The locals either volunteered to serve in the army or were unable to bribe their way out of obligatory service. Among the dead, there were only six (0.2 percent) from Moscow, even though the capi­tal's residents accounted for 9 percent of Russia's population.⁷ Putin was wary of declaring general conscription, fearing it would lead to mass protests in the capital. Partial mobilization was declared only in September, and it confronted the demo­graphic and healthcare problems that Russia had suffered for decades (see Chapter 6). No province lost more from the war than Donbas, which consisted of two Ukrainian regions that had been controlled by Russian-sponsored separatists since 2014: their men were conscripted, and women fled to Russia having no support there. As Bruno Latour wrote, "there are the two pincer movements of the land grab: the one appropriates, the other excludes."⁸

Towards the beginning of his reign, Putin was asked what had happened to the Russian submarine Kursk, which perished in the Arctic in August 2000. "It sank," he said, with a cyni­cal smile. The tautology of his response masked the shocking catastrophe. In trying to rescue the legacies of the Russian past - Orthodoxy, imperialism and Soviet collectivism - Putin wished to melt them into a new substance that could only be referred to as Putinism. But there was no melting pot for the task. It sank.

Ethnicity or politics?

The Russian economist Natalya Zubarevich spoke of the four belts of Russia: the first was made up of a dozen big cities, each with a population of more than a million; the second consisted of the decaying industrial belt of the Volga and the Urals; the third was the enormous agrarian heartland stretching from the Ukrainian border to the Pacific coast; and the fourth included the poor areas of the Caucasus and Southern Siberia, most of which were ethnically non-Russian.⁹ The government redis­tributed revenues, and all four belts were beneficiaries of the transfers that came from a small number of internal colonies - the oil-pumping and gas-trading regions at the center of the Eurasian continent. The biggest donors were two "autonomous districts" named after their indigenous populations that were largely extinct: the Khanty-Mansi District and the Yamalo- Nenets region - a vast land of empty marshes and migrating reindeers in Western Siberia. Another donor was Moscow, the official residence of many extractive corporations that were drilling and mining in Siberia but paying taxes in the capital. Nevertheless, the Khanty-Mansi delivered so much and con­sumed so little that this region contributed two times more to the Russian budget than Moscow.¹⁰

Tatarstan was another breadwinner in the post-Soviet empire. Settled on the banks of the Volga River, this boom­ing community possessed its own oil fields and industrial facilities. Speaking in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, in 1990, Boris Yeltsin offered the locals "as much sovereignty as you can swallow." Tatarstan held a referendum, and the citizens voted for sovereignty. Many debates about the elusive meaning of this word followed. In 1992, Moscow and Kazan signed a treaty, and Tatarstan became a "state united with the Russian Federation." However, its economic growth was faster than the rest of Russia's, and in many respects it acted like an independ­ent state.¹¹ On coming to power, Putin declared an end to this "parade of sovereignties." In 2001, Tatarstan's referendum was retrospectively declared unconstitutional. Having already lost billions of dollars to Moscow, Tatarstan had now lost its politi­cal autonomy as well.

In 2017 this attack on Tatar sovereignty, or what remained of it, resumed. This time the target was culture and language rights: Kazan lost its power to teach the Tatar language in local schools. The number of people who identified themselves as Tatars was decreasing with every new poll: many felt it safer to declare a Russian identity. But in contrast to Chechnya, Tatarstan retained a relative prosperity and peace. Moreover, its officials supported the war in Ukraine and recruited ethnic troops to fight there. Other "republics" such as Bashkortostan, Chuvashia and Chechnya also created ethnic battalions with ethnic commanders. In the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire had supported such formations, but the Soviet Union shunned the practice on the grounds that it would feed nation­alist violence and lead to the risk of new internal conflicts. In March 2022, ёгс^гё Tatar activists published an appeal urging the people of Tatarstan to separate from Russia.¹² Eventually, the fate of the Russian Federation would be decided in Kazan and the other capitals of the Eurasian republics, rather than in Moscow.

From Karelia to Chukotka, self-identified Russians had a numerical majority in many ethnic regions of Russia. However, confrontations between Moscow and the provinces concerned social and environmental issues as well as language and cul­tural policies. In this maze, Russians and non-Russians had many overlapping interests. The Russo-Ukrainian War demon­strated that, in the modern world, it is not ethnicity or identity that define people's choices but politics. Before 2014, Ukraine was a land of ethnic peace like Tatarstan, but it was forced to fight for its freedom like Chechnya. Many of those who fought in the Ukrainian army in 2022 spoke better Russian than their Russian foes, and made better use of their Soviet-manufactured weapons. Unlike homogeneous Chechnya, which is culturally distant from Russia but lost its war against the overwhelming force of Russian weapons and money, heterogeneous and cul­turally similar Ukraine was able to confront Russia vigorously.

The mass migration of Russians, Ukrainians and many others to Europe, Israel and the United States showed that these people could quickly become responsible citizens. As the Soviet saying had it, in their homeland they "pretended to work while their employers pretended to pay." In the US, ethnic Russians boasted median incomes that were higher than those of Chinese, Italian or even Swiss migrants.¹³ One in four staff members at Israel's universities were native Russian speak­ers. The first generation of post-Soviet Russians who arrived in Israel surprised the locals with their right-wing views, but research showed that the voting preferences of the second generation were indistinguishable from those of the general population.¹⁴ Multiple waves of Russian emigrants, including those who fled Putin's war in 2022, were natural experiments in causality. It was the Russian state that made its citizens of any ethnicity unproductive and frustrated, not the other way around.

Indigenous rights

Various nations in the Russian territory had been impatient with Putin's state. In 2019 in Izhevsk, the capital of the Udmurt Republic, Albert Razin set himself alight in protest at the suppression of his native Udmurt language. A banner found next to his body read "If my language disappears tomorrow, I am ready to die today" - a quote from the Dagestan poet Rasul Gamzatov.¹⁵ Earlier, in 2013, Ivan Moseev, a leader of the Pomory (Seasiders), was arrested for "inciting hatred against Russians" and collaborating with the Norwegian intelligence services. Almost nine years later, the European Court in Strasbourg ruled against Russia, declaring Moseev the victim of an illegal verdict. The Pomory - an ethnic minority in the Russian North with a distinct identity and culture - spoke a dialect of the Russian language and had never experienced serfdom. Led by the Pomory, massive protests shook Shiyes, a village in the Arkhangelsk region, in 2018-20. This barely populated area had already been crisscrossed by eight gas and oil pipelines. Moscow planned to construct a monstrous landfill there, destroying the woods that the locals used for hunting and berry-picking. It would have been Europe's largest garbage dump, with waste delivered from Moscow, located 1,200 kilometers away.¹⁶ The mass protests, in which locals blocked the railway line with tents, lasted two years. The pro­ject was cancelled in 2020. It was the biggest victory of the Green movement in contemporary Russia.

During the 1990s, indigenous rights were included in the new Russian constitution. The Russian Federation accepted responsibility for the "defense of age-old environments of hab­itation and traditional ways of life" (Article 72). The American political philosopher Leif Wenar argued that respecting the rights of indigenous peoples was the only way out of the oil curse: if hydrocarbons are to be mined and burned at all, the profits should go to the locals, and especially to those who have been discriminated against in previous periods.¹⁷ As Wenar observed, the constitutions of almost all nations proclaim that local mineral treasures belong to the people. This formula was present in the Soviet constitutions, but it never appeared in the constitution of the Russian Federation. The habitats of the Khanty, Mansi, Yakuts and other indigenous peoples of Northern Eurasia were circumscribed to facilitate the extrac­tion of oil, gas, coal and diamonds. Drillers destroyed even the national parks that had been created for these peoples in the 1990s. In 2017, Russian oil workers beat up Sergei Kechimov, a Khanty herder and shaman who tried to defend the holy Lake Numto from their invasion. Citing four oil spills that threatened local fish and birds, Kechimov tried to sue the powerful oil and gas company Surgutneftegaz, but was unsuc­cessful. Federal legislation passed in December 2013 removed the protected status of lands on which indigenous people hunted, fished and herded.¹⁸ In 2019, Alexander Gabyshev, a Yakut shaman, set out for Moscow on foot, "to drive President Vladimir Putin out of the Kremlin"; he was arrested on the way and subjected to forced psychiatric treatment, a form of torture.¹⁹ Even before the war, Marjorie Balzer, an American anthropologist who spent years in Yakutia, Buryatia and Tuva, believed in the potential of their emancipatory movements.²⁰ Intense discontent had been growing in the major cities of Siberia.²¹ Booming industrial centers, they experienced a sharp decline when the military orders dried up, as had happened after the Cold War and as happened again after the Russo- Ukrainian War. In September 2022, mass anti-government protests occurred in Dagestan, against both conscription and the war itself.

Having visited St. Petersburg in 1839, in the wake of the Russian army's brutal suppression of yet another Polish uprising, the French author the Marquis de Custine wrote that the Russian Empire was an "enormous prison, and only its emperor had the keys." In 1914, Lenin called the Russian

Empire "a prison of nations." This cyclical narrative was to be disrupted.

Bullitt's attempt

A hundred years before the Russo-Ukrainian War, two revo­lutions and a bloody civil war plunged the Russian Empire into chaos. In March 1918, the Bolsheviks exited World War I, signing a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk, in which Russia pledged to supply oil, gold, timber and other commodities to Germany. The Allies were worried that the Germans would take over parts of Russia and seize resources in the Urals. To preempt this, Japan proposed to invade Russia before the German army did. Moving along the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Japanese troops would make their way up through Siberia to the Urals. The Americans opposed the plan. Nurturing a romantic affinity for Russia, Woodrow Wilson's administration feared a stronger Japan. If Japan occupied Siberia, what guarantee would there be that its troops would ever leave? The future showed that Japan was indeed an unreliable ally of America.

Negotiations on the issue were led by Edward House, Wilson's chief advisor on European politics during World War I and at the Paris Peace Conference. A Southerner who owned plantations and wrote novels, House was a permanent presence in Democratic administrations up until the eve of World War II. In 1918, Wilson and House diluted the Japanese invasion plan by limiting its force to 10,000 men. In the event, largely thanks to the US president and his advisor, the Japanese invasion never happened.²²

World War I ended a few months later. But chaos continued to reign in Russia. Wilson had led his country into war in order to establish a perpetual peace. The Versailles Peace Treaty reshaped Europe, but the fire continued to blaze in Russia.

The various combatants in the Russian Civil War sent their representatives to the Paris Peace Conference. Their reports contradicted one another on each and every point. To clarify the situation, Wilson dispatched a reconnaissance mission to Russia.

William Bullitt, a young diplomat and journalist, led the mission, which also included two spies and one poet. The delegation was received in Moscow by Lenin, who enchanted Bullitt; as it happened, the sympathy was reciprocal. It was April 1919, when the Bolsheviks were at their most vulnerable: retreating, they controlled the least territory of all the combat­ants in the Civil War. Bullitt drew up a plan for reconciling all the belligerents. The former Russian Empire would be divided into twenty-three parts; each combatant would get the territory it controlled at that moment. Finland, Ukraine and the Baltic countries had already been recognized by the international community. Southern Russia, the Urals, Siberia and Tatarstan would also become independent states. The Bolsheviks would be left with Moscow, Petrograd and eight provinces surround­ing these cities. The project fit with Wilson's concept of the self-determination of peoples. In a similar way, the Balkan states were created on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The arbiter would be a new international organiza­tion, the League of Nations, which would recognize the new independent states at a special conference in Oslo.

Lenin agreed to Bullitt's proposal and confirmed his partici­pation in the planned conference. Now, Bullitt and House had only to convince the remaining combatants. But first the plan had to be approved by Woodrow Wilson. Bullitt rushed from Moscow to Paris, where House was preparing for a meeting with Wilson. The meeting never took place. The president was tired and had heart problems; probably he had his first stroke. But it is also possible that Wilson's hesitation was linked to his attitude towards Russia: he did not want to be responsible for its dismantlement.²³

For Bullitt, this was a severe disappointment, and he resigned. He later went on to testify against Wilson in the Senate. House was also upset. He proposed as an alternative that Russia should be divided into five parts, with Siberia inde­pendent and European Russia split. Wilson was not convinced, and the peace plan failed again. Bullitt later wrote a psycho- biography of Wilson, co-authored with Sigmund Freud. In it, he claimed with bitterness that Wilson's rejection of the plan to split Russia was "the most important single decision that he made in Paris."²⁴ Indeed, Wilson saved Russia twice - the first time from Japanese invasion, and the second time from internal secession.

On December 23, 2021, Putin reiterated his suspicion of American intentions towards Russia. He recalled that "one of President Woodrow Wilson's advisors" had endorsed the partition of Russia into five parts, and cited an entry in House's personal diary from September 1918. The Russian president did not, however, thank his American counterpart for having preserved a united Russia.

Who needed this Federation?

Much had changed in Eurasia since the era of Wilson and Lenin. Russia's military and economic power had impressed its neighbors for decades. Two key factors ensured this might: nuclear weapons, which provided security, and fossil fuel exports, which generated the enormous revenues that stabi­lized the local currency and enriched the rulers.

Neither was produced by the living generations. Oil was not created by labor; some places had it but many others did not, which was why it was so expensive. Russia's nuclear weapons had been built by the fathers or grandfathers of those in power. Relying on their pipelines and inherited nuclear umbrella, the Russian leaders appropriated the nation's wealth without lifting a finger. Embezzlement created record inequalities not seen even under the tsars. Two unearned privileges, wealth and security, shaped the elite that started the war. Well-paid propagandists assured the people that peace, tranquility and a stable currency were being secured through the hard work of this elite. The people believed this for as long as they had peace, tranquility and a stable currency. They thanked their leaders, and for a while it seemed as if these rulers would rule forever.

But for decades, nothing was produced in the Federation. The pipes continued to pump oil and the nuclear weapons continued to protect. The rulers got older and richer, and the people went on with their lives more or less without com­plaint. The Federation consisted of many regions, large and small, and they didn't complain either. Thanks to the oil, the money the elite received was convertible and could be used to buy nice cars or villas abroad. Thanks to the nuclear weapons, the Federation protected all its regions from their enemies and from each other. As long as there was peace and oil in the Federation, everyone could hope that this would always be the case. The oil would flow out through the pipes and the money would flow back in. The formidable weapons would continue to protect while remaining unused. There would be more and more villas and yachts to purchase overseas. And nothing too bad would happen to the ordinary folk.

The best-kept secret of the Federation was why its rulers decided to start their war. Explanations ranged from bore­dom to despair, realism to fetishism. More significant was the fact that the rulers had never waged such a war and were not expecting it to be a long and difficult endeavor. They did not know that during it their oil would no longer be purchased, that goods would stop flowing into the country, that people accustomed to having money would stop working if they were left unpaid. Confronting such difficulties, the rulers now had to decide whether to use their nuclear weapons.

On the one hand, if they were not used, the Federation would lose the war. There were many explanations for why they couldn't win without using these weapons: their commanders were incompetent, their missiles were imprecise, their soldiers were hungry. The fecklessness of the rulers was matched by the impotence of the people; both had been numbed by the constant flow of oil and the awesome power of their weapons. Now that the oil was no longer flowing, the weapons would have their say.

On the other hand, these ancient weapons of the ances­tors had never been used. For decades they had sat in storage, their use-by dates extended many times. Of course, they had been tested, but over the months of war the rulers realized that drills were one thing and combat quite another. In short, using the nuclear weapons was a difficult decision to take. The Federation's rulers were not prepared to take it, or maybe their weapons were not in good shape. The soldiers fought to the bitter end until they lost the war.

Well, they lost and that's all there is to it. The rulers had to move on. But first they had to pay for the colossal daimage they had done to their neighbor, and this used up all the reserves they had not already wasted. They were left with a lot of oil they couldn't sell and a lot of weapons they couldn't use. Discontent spread throughout the Federation.

The rulers' villas and yachts were gone. Their nuclear weap­ons had been feared only for as long as others thought they could be used against them. But since the Federation had lost its most important war without using its most important weapons, that meant it would never use them. And it would never sell oil again either: people abroad had somehow learned to live without oil. So who now needed this Federation?

Oil that could not be sold and weapons that could not be used turned the center of the country into an enormous ware­house for the dirtiest scum on earth. But in many other regions of the Federation, a new life began. Not immediately, but they gradually learned how to earn their own living and defend themselves. Some traded in the scraps the Federation had left them, but each eventually came up with their own ways to prosper: some sold grain, others cars; some taught students and others invited tourists. Relieved of the combined curse of oil and weapons, these were beautiful countries.

It was the people who decided which countries emerged after the Federation broke up. Ethnic tensions played their role, but events were triggered by the exhaustion of the sub­sidies and protection the regions had received from Moscow. Some of them already had their borders and leaders in place, others did not. New borders and authorities were contested, and violence followed. But it could not be worse than what the Federation had unleashed with its nuclear threats, global blackmail and transcontinental famine.

The new states were diverse - some democratic, others authoritarian. Their bigger neighbors were their main partners in trade and security. New tensions and dilemmas emerged. Would China shift its focus from Taiwan to Siberia? Would Eastern Prussia be viable as an independent state or would it merge with one of its neighbors? How would the poor, over- populated republics of the Caucasus sustain themselves? And how would the reparations to Ukraine be divided?

The Federation's dismemberment threw up an enormous number of legal, strategic and economic questions. Settling borders, rebuilding trade and negotiating security arrange­ments took decades. Dealing with the legacy of the heinous war and creating new statehoods did not happen immediately. But the peoples of the former Federation learned how to make their own way. History continued, and the international com­munity took note of the changes.

A peace conference was held, modeled after the Paris Peace Conference of 1918-19. A new Eurasian Treaty completed the work begun at Versailles a century earlier. From Ukraine to Mongolia, the neighbors of the new countries mediated

Notes

Introduction

Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, Penguin, 2006.

For my analysis of Kant's response to the Russian occupa­tion, see Alexander Etkind, "Kant's Subaltern Period: The Birth of Cosmopolitanism from the Spirit of Occupation," in Cosmopolitanism in Conflict, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, 55-83.

Marc Bloch, "Reflections of a Historian on the False News of the War," Michigan War Studies Review, July 2013, https://www.mi wsr.com/2013-051.aspx

1 Modernity in the Anthropocene

Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Post-Modernity, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1992, 179. Bauman started his career as an intel­ligence officer in the Internal Security Corps of socialist Poland, fighting with the Ukrainian insurgents in the late 1940s.

Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage, 1992; Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford University Press, 1990, and Giddens, Politics of Climate Change, Cambridge: Polity, 2009.

James Lovelock, "Gaia: The Living Earth," Nature, December 18, 2003: 769-70; Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford University Press, 2016; Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press, 2012; Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Polity, 2017.

Beck, Risk Society, Latour, Facing Gaia.

Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience, Polity, 2011.

Yakov Rabkin and Mikhail Minakov, eds. Demodernization: A Future in the Past, ibidem, 2018; Alexander Etkind and Mikhail Minakov, "Post-Soviet transit and Demodernization," The Ideology and Politics Journal 1 (2018): 4-13.

Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, Polity, 1984.

Masha Gessen, The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, 2nd edition, Riverhead, 2022, xii.

David G. Lewis, Russia's New Authoritarianism: Putin and the Politics of Order, Edinburgh University Press, 2020; Greg Yudin, "The War in Ukraine: Do Russians Support Putin?," Journal of Democracy 33.3 (2022): 31-7.

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty, Penguin, 2019.

Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, Wiley, 1979, 4.

Vladimir Shlapentokh, "Trust in Public Institutions in Russia: The Lowest in the World," Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39.2 (2006): 153-74; Geoffrey Hosking, Trust: A History, Oxford University Press, 2014; Alexay Tikhomirov, "The Regime of Forced Trust: Making and Breaking Emotional Bonds between People and State in Soviet Russia, 1917-1941," Slavonic & East European Review 91.1 (2013): 78-118.

Ulrich Beck, "World at Risk: The New Task of Critical Theory," Development and Society 37 (2008): 10.

Samuel A. Greene and Graeme B. Robertson, Putin v. the People: The Perilous Politics of a Divided Russia, Yale University

Press, 2019; Tatiana Kasperski and Andrei Stsiapanau, "Trust, Distrust and Radioactive Waste Management in Contemporary Russia," Journal of Risk Research 25.5 (2022): 648-65; Vladimir Gelman, The Politics of Bad Governance in Contemporary Russia, University of Michigan, 2022.

Ulrich Beck, "Climate for Change, or How to Create a Green Modernity?," Theory, Culture & Society 27.2-3 (2010): 254-66, quoted from 257.

Pey-Yi Chu, Life of Permafrost: A History of Frozen Earth in Russian and Soviet Science, University of Toronto Press, 2021; Susan Alexandra Crate, Once Upon the Permafrost: Knowing Culture and Climate Change in Siberia, University of Arizona Press, 2022; Joshua Jaffa, "The Great Siberian Thaw," The New Yorker, January 17, 2022; https://theglobalobservatory.org/2021 /11/how-permafrost-thaw-puts-the-russian-arctic-at-risk

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62652133

Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen and Nina Tynkkynen, "Climate Denial Revisited: (Re) Contextualising Russian Public Discourse on Climate Change during Putin 2.0," Europe-Asia Studies 70.7 (2018): 1103-20.

For a similar argument, see Brian D Taylor, The Code of Putinism, Oxford University Press, 2018.

https://www.mk.ru/politics/2022/07/20/putin-poshutil-naschet -netradicionnykh-otnosheniy-na-zapade.html

Kay Rollins, "Putin's Other War: Domestic Violence, Traditional Values, and Masculinity in Modern Russia," Harvard International Review, August 3, 2022.

For different views on Russia's fascism, see Timothy Snyder, "Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine," The New York Review of Books, March 20,2014; Snyder, "We Should Say It. Russia is Fascist," The New York Times, May 19, 2022; Marlene Laruelle, "So, Is Russia Fascist Now? Labels and Policy Implications," The Washington Quarterly 45.2 (2022): 149-68.

http://rg.ru/2004/04/26/Illarionov.html; https://euobserver.com /world/15207

Daniel Schulman, Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty, Hachette UK, 2014.

Alexander Etkind, Tolkovanie puteshestvii. Rossiia i Amerika v travelogakh i intertekstakh, NLO, 2022.

Alexander Gusev, "Evolution of Russian Climate Policy: From the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement," L'Europe en Formation 380.2 (2016): 39-52.

https://ria.ru/20150619/1078810271.html

https://www.rbc.ru/economics/26/07/2021/60fac8469a7947dlf 4871b47

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/putin-blames-euro pean-energy-market-hysteria-green-transition-drive-2021-10-05

Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, "A Normal Country: Russia after Communism," Journal of Economic Perspectives 19/1 (2005): 151-74.

https://www.iep.ru/en/world-bank-updates-its-country-classific ation-by-gni-per-capita.html

https://atias.cid.harvard.edu/rankings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending _on_education_(%25_of_GDP)

https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/h3f86901f7country =BRA&indicator=32416&viz=line_chart&years=2001,2021

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/carbon -footprint-by-country

https://www.theglobaIeconomy.com/ranldngs/happiness

https://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?v=24

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/wb_political_sta bility

https://www.ofFshore-energy.biz/norway-shows-lowest-and-ca nada-highest-upstream-carbon-footprint-rystad-says

https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2020 /russias-military-spending-frequently-asked-questions; https:// faridaily.substack.com/p/-20-?utm_source=%2Fprofile%2F8045 7290-farida-rustamova&utm_medium=reader2

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/two-lean-years-russias -budget-for-2018-2020

Alexander Etkind, Nature's Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources, Polity, 2021.

2 Petrostate

Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela, University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Eduardo Gudynas, Extractivisms: Politics, Economy and Ecology, Fernwood, 2021.

Etkind, Nature's Evil.

Marshall I. Goldman, Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia, Oxford University Press, 2008.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/arielcohen/2018/06/29/opec-is -dead-long-live-opec/?sh=133baa92217a

Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, Verso, 2013; Bruno Latour, "Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene," New Literary History 45.1 (2014): 1-18; Etkind, Nature's Evil.

Michael L. Ross, The Oil Curse, Princeton University Press, 2012.

Paul Krugman, Rethinking International Trade, MIT Press, 1994.

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Belknap Press, 1971.

https://static.rusi.org/RUSI-Silicon-Lifeline-final-web.pdf

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5357614

https://www.vokrugsveta.ru/articles/karta-kolichestvo-smertei -na-dorogakh-v-god-id620885

https://www.rbc.ru/business/ 15/06/2022/62a325689a7947f6223 811e2

https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Putin-suggests-Germa ns-replace-nuclear-with-firewo

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-solar-and-wind-po wer-by-country

Mitchell, Carbon Democracy.

Etkind, Nature's Evil, chapter 13.

Clifford G. Gaddy and Barry W. Ickes, "Russia's Dependence on Resources', in Michael Alexeev and Shlomo Weber, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy, Oxford University Press, 2013; for the opposite position on Russia's oil curse, see Daniel Treisman, "Is Russia Cursed by Oil?," Journal of International Affairs 63.2 (2010): 85-102.

Ross, The Oil Curse.

Jakov Mirkin, "Rost zolotogo zapasa v Rossii - dlinnyj trend," Rossijskaja Gazeta, October 28, 2018.

Felix Creutzig, "Fuel Crisis: Slash Demand in Three Sectors to Protect Economies and Climate," Nature, June 13, 2022.

3 Parasitic Governance

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Meridian Books, 1958.

Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, The Light That Failed: A Reckoning, Penguin, 2019.

Nataliya Gevorkyan et al., First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President, Hutchinson, 2000, 192.

Vache Gabrielyan, "Discourse in Comparative Policy Analysis: Privatisation Policies in Britain, Russia and the United States," Policy and Society 25.2 (2006): 47-75.

Gevorkyan et al., First Person, 192.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1097135961

Leon Trotsky, Chto takoe SSSR i kuda on idet, Grassi, 1938.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB984947892753855394

https://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/in-1999-35-mil lion-small-family-plots-produced-90-of-russias-potatoes-77-of -vegetables-87-of-fruits-59-of-meat-49-of-milk-way-to-go-peop le

Nancy Ries, "Potato Ontology: Surviving Postsocialism in Russia," Cultural Anthropology 24.2 (2009): 181-212.

https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2166065

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

The first LNG exports from Russia started in 2017; see https://

www.oxfordenergy.org/pubiications/a-phantom-menace-is-rus

sian-lng-a-threat-to-russias-pipeline-gas-in-europe

https://www.proekt.media/guide/gazprom-aleksey-miller

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18

_3921

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/201904 02IPR34673/natural-gas-parliament-extends-eu-rules-to-pipel ines-from-non-eu-countries Gessen, The Man without a Face, xii.

Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, Harvard University Press, 2021.

E. T. Gaidar, Gibel'imperii: uroki dlia sovremennoiRossii, Astrel, 2012.

Maria Snegovaya, "What Factors Contribute to the Aggressive Foreign Policy of Russian Leaders?," Problems of Post- Communism 67.1 (2020): 93-110.

James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden

Transcripts, Yale University Press, 1990.

Alexander Etkind, Kacper Szulecki and Ilya Yablokov, "Petroleum

Conspiracies: How Russian Policymakers Seek Meaning in Oil

Price Volatility," Beyond Market Assumptions: Oil Price as a

Global Institution, Springer, 2020, 79-102.

https://tass.ru/politika/6408976?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37109169

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/06/20/a-chance-for-revenge

Etkind et al., "Petroleum Conspiracies."

Etkind et al., "Petroleum Conspiracies."

https://www.transparency.org/en/news/countering-russian-kl

eptocrats-wests-response-to-assault-on-ukraine

https://en.rebaltica.lv/2022/03/who-are-the-people-from-pu

tins-inner-circle-with-properties-in-latvia

https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2022/03/05/a-gu

ide-to-all-the-outrageous-mansions-and-estates-owned-by-san

ctioned-russian-billionaires/?sh=4499a6772e0f

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/how-russian-sanctions-are-per meating-switzerland-s-luxury-sanctum/47642728

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-07/germa ny-s-yachtmaker-to-the-oligarchs-asks-who-its-customers-are

https://www.rferl.Org/a/putin-navalny-superyacht-scheheraza de/31764751.html

Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Penguin, 2011.

4 The So-Called Elite

Juliette Cadiot, La societe de voleurs. La protection de la proprete socialiste sous Stalin, EHESS 2019; Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 581.

Abram Bergson, "Income Inequality Under Soviet Socialism," Journal of Economic Literature 22.3 (1984): 1052-99.

Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 596; Philipp Ther, Europe since 1989, Princeton University Press, 2016.

Ilya Matveev, "Measuring Income Inequality in Russia: A Note on Data Sources," Russian Analytical Digest 263 (2021): 5-11.

Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, "From Soviets to Oligarchs: Inequality and Property in Russia 1905­2016," The Journal of Economic Inequality 16.2 (2018): 189-223.

Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 578.

Credit Swiss, Global Wealth Report 2022, 31, at https://www .credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth -report.html

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1262949/countries-with-the -most-millionaires; https://en.wikipedia.0rg/wiki/List_0f_U.S._s tates_by_the_number_of_millionaire_households

Dmitrii Nekrasov, https://www.facebook.com/dmitry.al.nekra sov; https://www.moscowtimes.ru/2022/05/30/naselenie-za-vs yo-zaplatit-pochemu-nesmotrya-na-sanktsii-u-putina-ne-konc hatsya-dengi-na-voinu-a20792

Semyon Kordonsky, Resursnoe gosudarstvo, Regnum, 2007.

Evgeny Gontmakher and Cameron Ross, "The Middle Class and

Democratisation in Russia," Europe-Asia Studies 67.2 (2015): 269-84.

Gontmakher and Ross, "The Middle Class and Democratisation in Russia."

Olga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, "Putin's Militocracy," Post-Soviet Affairs 19.4 (2003): 289-306.

Maria Snegovaya and Kirill Petrov, "Long Soviet Shadows: The Nomenklatura Ties of Putin Elites," Post-Soviet Affairs 38.4 (2022): 1-20.

https://ria.ru/20221119/sobyanin-1832713301.html

Anders Aslund, Russia's Crony Capitalism, Yale University Press, 2019; Karen Dawisha, Putin's Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? Simon and Schuster, 2014.

Piketty, Capital and Ideology, 600.

Kenneth Arrow, Samuel Bowles and Steven N. Durlauf, eds. Meritocracy and Economic Inequality, Princeton University Press, 2018; Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap, Penguin, 2019.

John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB95738578060490250

Maxim Trudolyubov, The Tragedy of Property: Private Life, Ownership and the Russian State, Polity, 2018.

Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Base of Politics, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963, 41.

Adam Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-being in the World 1950-1990, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Shleifer and Treisman, "A Normal Country: Russia After Communism."

Daniel Treisman, "Economic Development and Democracy: Predispositions and Triggers," Annual Review of Political Science 23.1 (2020): 241-57, quoted 255.

David Shearman and Joseph Wane Smith, The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy, Praeger, 2007.

27 Anthony Giddens, The Politics of Climate Change, Polity, 2009, 36.

5 The Public Sphere

Dan Healey, Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi, Bloomsbury, 2017; Alexander Sasha Kondakov, Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia, UCL, 2022.

Sirke Makinen, "Surkovian Narrative on the Future of Russia: Making Russia a World Leader," Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 27.2 (2011): 143-65.

https://www.chathamhouse.org/2022/02/why-minsk-2-cannot -solve-ukraine-crisis

Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia, Faber & Faber, 2017.

See Maurizio Carbone, "Russia's Trojan Horse in Europe? Italy and the War in Georgia," Italian Politics 24 (2008): 135-51; Valerie Sperling, Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia, Oxford University Press, 2014.

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/figure-of-the-week-l-3-billion; Anton Shekhovtsov, ed. RT in Europe and Beyond: The Wannabe Elite of the Anti-Elites, Centre for Democratic Integrity, 2022.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2004/03/18/did-soros-final ly-exit-svyazinvest-a232281

https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/george-soros -future-europe-and-russia-open-societies

Gregory Asmolov, "The Disconnective Power of Disinformation Campaigns," Journal of International Affairs 71.1.5 (2018): 69-76.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/24/vladimir -putin-web-breakup-internet-cia; Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, The Red Web: The Kremlin's Wars on the Internet, Perseus Books, 2017.

https://www.rferl.0rg/a/russia-yandex-trouble-sancti0ns-ukra ine/31769182.html

Samuel A. Greene, "From Boom to Bust: Hardship, Mobilization & Russia's Social Contract," Daedalus 146.2 (2017): 113-27.

E.g., Putin's friend, the Rector of the Petersburg Mining University, earned 195 million rubles in 2016, the Rector of the Presidential Academy 65 million, and the Rector of the Higher School of Economics 45 million. The salary of a professor was estimated at 100-200 thousand rubles: https://myslo.ru/news /mir/2017-12-03-minobrnauki-proverit-zarplaty-rektorov-na -adekvatnost

https://rg.ru/2022/06/02/obiavleny-rezultaty-vyborov-ran.html

https://web.archive.Org/web/20161230022705/http://www.slate .com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/05/the_thri ving_russian_black_market_in_dissertations_and_the_crusade rs_fighting.html

Daniele Fattorini and Francesco Regoli, "Role of the Chronic Air Pollution Levels in Covid-19 Outbreak Risk in Italy," Environmental Pollution 264 (2020): 114732; Myrto Kasioumi and Thanasis Stengos, "The Effect of Pollution on the Spread of COVID-19 in Europe," Economics of Disasters and Climate Change 6.1 (2022): 129-40.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/10/08/russias-corona virus-excess-death-toll-hits-660k-a75254

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-covid -count-fake-statistics/2021/10/16/b9d47058-277f-llec-8739-5c b6aba30a30_story.html

Anders Aslund, "Responses to the COVID-19 crisis in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus," Eurasian Geography and Economics 61.4-5 (2020): 532-45.

https://www.centrumbalticum.org/files/5109/BSR_Policy_Brie fing_ll_2021.pdf; see also Anna Temkina and Michele Rivkin- Fish, "Creating Health Care Consumers: The Negotiation of Un/ official Payments, Power and Trust in Russian Maternity Care," Social Theory & Health 18.4 (2020): 340-57.

Konstantin Platonov and Kirill Svetlov, "Conspiracy Theories Dissemination on SNS Vkontakte: COVID-19 Case,"

International Conference on Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia, Springer, 2020.

Olga V. Kruzhkova et al., "Vandal Practices as a Psychological Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic," Changing Societies & Personalities 5.3 (2021): 452-80.

https://www.dissernet.org/publications/medinskyi-plagiat.htm

https://meduza.io/news/2022/06/09/putin-petr-i-ne-ottorgal -zemli-on-ih-vozvraschal-na-nashu-dolyu-tozhe-vypalo-vozvra schat

Gevorkyan et al., First Person, 52.

Alexander Etkind, "Mourning and Melancholia in Putin's Russia: An Essay in Qualitative Mnemonics," in Ellen Rutten et al., ed. Old Conflicts, New Media: Post-Socialist Digital Memories, Routledge, 2013, 32-48.

Alexander Etkind, "Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied: Magical Historicism in Contemporary Russian Fiction," Slavic Review 68.3 (2009): 631-58.

Viktor Shnirelman, Koleno Danovo. Eskhatologiia I antisemitism v sovremennoj Rossii, BBI, 2017.

Masha Gessen, "The Mysterious Murder of Darya Dugina," The New Yorker, August 26, 2022.

Alexander Etkind, Warped Mourning, Stanford University Press, 2013.

Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet and Ben Noble, Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future? Oxford University Press, 2021; Alexander Etkind, "Alexey Navalny: A Hero of the New Time," New Perspectives 30.1 (2022): 19-26.

Jussi Lassila, "Aleksei Naval'nyi and Populist Re-ordering of Putin's Stability," Europe-Asia Studies 68.1 (2016): 118-37.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/30/alexei -navalny-parliamentary-republic-russia-ukraine

6 Gender and Degeneration

1 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, University of Chicago Press, 2008, 52.

https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/metals-and-mining/our -insights/why-women-are-leaving-the-mining-industry-and-wh at-mining-companies-can-do-about-it; https://www.respons ibleminingfoundation.org/app/uploads/EN_Research-Insight -Gender-Inequality-June-2020.pdf

Alexander Etkind, "Petromacho, or Mechanisms of De-Modernization in a Resource State," Russian Politics & Law 56.1-2 (2018): 72-85 (published in Russian in 2013). Cara Daggett authored a similar concept; see her "Petro-masculinity: Fossil fuels and Authoritarian Desire," Millennium 47.1 (2018): 25-44.

Ross, The Oil Curse, chapter 4.

Alexander Etkind, "Introduction: Genres and Genders of Protest in Russia's Petrostate," in Birgit Beumers et al., eds. Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia, Routledge, 2017, 1-16.

Simon Smith Kuznets, Population, Capital, and Growth, W. W. Norton, 1973.

https://www.focaalbIog.com/2022/04/26/susan-paulson-gender -aware-care-in-pandemic-and-postgrowth-worlds

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core /content/view/CB2D305CB18AFF14E93BB0EDAA3DDC84/Sl 474746419000058a.pdf/gender_gap_in_Iife_expectancy_in_rus sia_the_role_of_aIcohol_consumption.pdf

Mark G. Field, "The Health Crisis in the Former Soviet Union: A Report from the 'Post-war' Zone," Social Science & Medicine 41.11 (1995): 1469-78.

10 https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/08/14/why-the -former-ussr-has-far-fewer-men-than-women/#:~:text=The %20gender%20ratio%20in%20Russia,Soviet%20nations%20are %20similarly%20low; https://knoema.com/atlas/Russian-Feder ation/topics/Demographics/PopuIation/Male-to-female-ratio; https://statisticstimes.com/demographics/country/china-sex-ra tio.php#:~:text=Gender%20ratio%20in%20China&text=In%20 2020%2C%20the%20sex%20ratio,701.08%20million%20females %20in%20China.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1089814/russia-women-to -men-ratio-by-age

https://en.wikipedia.org/wilci/List_of_countries_by_life_expecta ncy#CIA_World_Factbook_(2022)

https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-gender-gap-report -2021

https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2021.pdf

Ying Feng and Jie Ren, "Within Marriage Age Gap across Countries," Economics Letters 210 (2022).

Yulia Artemyeva, "Economic Dimensions and Legal Regulation of the Recovery of Alimony Obligations for the Support of Minor Children in Russia," Journal of Eastern European and Central Asian Research 8.4 (2021): 640-52.

https://rg.ru/2022/05/30/rg-publikuet-predvaritelnye-itogi-vs erossijskoj-perepisi-naseleniia.html

Michele Rivkin-Fish, "Pronatalism, Gender Politics, and the Renewal of Family Support in Russia: Toward a Feminist Anthro­pology of'Maternity Capital,"' Slavic Review 69.3 (2010): 701-24.

Alexander Mitscherlich, Society Without the Father, Tavistock, 1969.

Maurice Godelier, Mitamorphoses de la parente, Fayard, 2004.

David W. Shwalb, Barbara J. Shwalb and Michael E. Lamb, eds. Fathers in Cultural Context, Routledge, 2013; Jonas Radl, Leire Salazar and Hector Cebolla-Boado, "Does Living in a Fatherless Household Compromise Educational Success? A Comparative Study of Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skills," European Journal of Population 33.2 (2017): 217-42.

Jennifer Utrata, Women without Men: Single Mothers and Family Change in the New Russia, Cornell University Press, 2015,17.

William C. Cockerham, "The Intersection of Life Expectancy and Gender in a Transitional State: The Case of Russia," Sociology of Health & Illness 34.6 (2012): 943-57.

Tanya Jukkala et al., "Economic Strain, Social Relations, Gender, and Binge Drinking in Moscow," Social Science & Medicine 66.3 (2008): 663-74.

Anatoly Vishnevsky, 'The Depopulated Superpower', Russia in Global Affairs, 3 (2003).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008 /10/03/AR2008100301976.html

Nicholas Eberstadt, "Russia's Peacetime Demographic Crisis," NBR Project Report, May 2010, 5.

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, Harvard University Press, 1970.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest -countries-in-the-world

Anne Case and Angus Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Princeton University Press, 2020; Lawrence King, Gabor Scheiring and Elias Nosrati, "Deaths of Despair in Comparative Perspective," Annual Review of Sociology 48 (2022).

Sharon Home, "Domestic Violence in Russia," American Psychologist 54.1 (1999): 55.

Olimpiada Usanova, "Russia's 'Traditional Values' and Domestic Violence," Kennan Cable 53 (2020).

Anna Andreeva, Nataliia Drozhashchikh and Galina Nelaeva, "Women's Rights and the Feminists' 'Dirty Plans': Media Discourses during the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia," Affilia 36.3 (2021): 319-35.

https://bataysk-gorod.ru/news/shestdesyat-protsentov-tridtsati letnikh-detey-v-nashey-strane-zhivut-s-roditelyami; https://74 .ru/ text/family/2021/07/31/70054088

Utrata, Women without Men, 126.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-military-shooting -idUSI

Franchise Dauce and Elisabeth Sieca-Kozlowski, eds. Dedovshchina in the Post-Soviet Military: Hazing of Russian Army Conscripts in a Comparative Perspective, ibidem, 2006; Maya Eichler, Militarizing Men: Gender, Conscription, and War in Post-Soviet Russia, Stanford University Press, 2011; Alena Maklak, "Dedovshchina on Trial: Some Evidence Concerning the Last Soviet Generation of 'Sons' and 'Grandfathers,'" Nationalities Papers 43.5 (2015): 682-99; Framboise Dauce, "Dedovshchina after the Reform: Ethnicity as a Justification for Violence in the Russian Army," Problems of Post-Communism 61.2 (2014): 36-45; Karen Petrone, "Gender, Militarism, and the Modern Nation in Soviet and Russian Cultures," The Routledge Handbook of Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia, Routledge, 2021,196-204.

38 Ulrich Beck, "How Modern is Modern Society?," Theory, Culture & Society 9.2 (1992): 163-9, quoted from 167.

7 Putin's War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_billionaires

Mikhail Anipkin, "Pokolenie lishnikh lidei: antropologicheskij portret poslednego sovetskogo pokoleniya," Neprikosnovennyj zapas, 2018.

https://www.ukrinform.ru/rubric-world/3442324-glava-minfi na-germanii-peredumal-otnositelno-pobedy-putina-v-ukraine .html; Liva Gerster, "You Do Not Want to Hear His Words," Frankfurter Allgemeine, March 28, 2022.

Adam Tooze, Chartbook 68, https://adamtooze.substack.com /p/chartbook-68-putins-challenge-to?s=r; see also his further clarifications in Chartbook 81, https://adamtooze.com/2022/02 /12/chartbook-81-permanent-crisis-or-black-earth-agro-giant -alternative-futures-for-ukraine

Katrina vanden Heuvel, "A Path Out of the Ukraine Crisis," Washington Post, February 15, 2022.

Thane Gustafson, Klimat: Russia in the Age of Climate Change, Harvard University Press, 2021, 13-15.

Niall Ferguson, "Putin's Ukrainian War Is About Making Vladimir Great Again," Bloomberg, January 2, 2022.

Niall Ferguson, "Putin Misunderstands History. So, Unfortunately, Does the US," https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/20 22-03-22/niall-ferguson-putin-and-biden-misunderstand-histo ry-in-ukraine-war 9 https://euideas.eui.eu/2022/07/ll/john-mearsheimers-lecture -on-ukraine-why-he-is-wrong-and-what-are-the-consequen ces/?fbclid=IwAROhxr831SBwJYFUcnSOmI

In 1989 Finland imported 94 percent of its oil from the USSR, paying mosdy by food and consumer goods; this trade was "par­ticularly profitable." Pekka Sutela, "Finnish Trade with the USSR: Why Was It Different?," BOFIT 7 (2005); https://euromaidan press.com/2022/03/01/finlandization-was-malignant-for-finla nd-and-it-might-be-even-worse-for-ukraine

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-04/deutsc he-bank-ceo-sees-german-recession-if-russian-gas-cut-off

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ben-bernanke/2015/04/03/ger manys-trade-surplus-is-a-problem

Alexander Etkind, "Ukraine, Russia, and Genocide of Minor Differences," Journal of Genocide Research (2022), https://doi .org/10.1080/14623528.2022.2082911

Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., 2005, 79.

A. Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, Cambridge University Press, 2021, chapter 6; Etkind, Internal Colonization, chapter 5.

Etkind, "Ukraine, Russia, and Genocide of Minor Differences."

Viktor Shklovskii, Zoo, or, Letters Not About Love, Cornell University Press, 1971.

Pal Kolsto, "The 'Narcissism of Minor Differences' Theory: Can It Explain Ethnic Conflict?," Filozofija i Drustvo (2007), https:// doi.org/10.2298/FID0702153I<

Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, and Other Works, The Hogarth Press, 1961, 114.

Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, BBC Books, 1994,14.

"Transcript: Vladimir Putin's Televised Address on Ukraine,"

Bloomberg, February 24, 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com /news/articles/2022-02-24/full-transcript-vladimir-putin-s-tele vised-address-to-russia-on-ukraine-feb-24

8 Defederating Russia

For recent statements on this issue, see Alexander Etkind, "Defederating Russia," Desk Russia, April 18, 2022, https://en .desk-russie.eu/2022/04/18/defederating-russia.html; Michael Casey, "Decolonize Russia," The Atlantic, May 27, 2022.

Karl Marx, The Eastern Question, Sonnenchein, 1897, 396.

Marx, The Eastern Question, 36-7.

Galina Starovoitova, "Politics After Communism: Weimar Russia?," Journal of Democracy 4.3 (1993): 106-9, quoted from 108.

Viatcheslav Morozov, Russia's PostcolonialIdentity: A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World, Springer, 2015; Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, The Red Mirror: Putin's Leadership and Russia's Insecure Identity, Oxford University Press, 2020; Janusz Bugajski, Failed State: A Guide to Russia's Rupture, Jamestown Foundation, 2022.

https://rujec.org/articles.php?id=30166

https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-61638530

Bruno Latour, After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis, Polity, 2021, 112.

https://www.vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2011/12/30/chety re_rossii

https://www.acra-ratings.ru/research/2302

Katherine E. Graney, Of Khans and Kremlins: Tatarstan and the Future of Ethno-Federalism in Russia, Lexington Books, 2009.

https://www.idelreal.0rg/a/31748U4.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethriic_groups_in_the _United_States_by_household_income

https://ridl.io/israel-s-russian-speaking-minority-political-force -in-the-knesset

https://globalvoices.org/2019/09/16/a-professors-self-immo lation-puts-the-spotlight-on-the-fragile-future-of-russias-mino rity-languages

Daria Tereshina, '"Shiyes Is Our Stalingrad': Garbage Riots and Moral Outrage in Northwest Russia," https://www.eth.mpg.de /5353781/blog_2019_12_10_01

Leif Wenar, Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules That Run the World, Oxford University Press, 2015.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/17/reindeer -herder-oil-excavators-siberia; https://www.themoscowtimes .com/2015/08/18/russian-shaman-battles-oil-giant-over-sacred -lake-a49038

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/09/russia-siber ian-shaman-who-marched-against-putin-is-indefinitely-confi ned-to-a-psychiatric-hospital

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, The Tenacity of Ethnicity, Princeton University Press, 2021.

Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, Brookings Institution Press, 2003.

Carl J. Richard, When the United States Invaded Russia: Woodrow Wilson's Siberian Disaster, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012.

Alexander Etkind, Roads Not Taken: An Intellectual Biography of William C. Bullitt, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017.

William C. Bullitt, "Foreword," in Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, Houghton Mifflin, 1966.

Index

abortions 96-7

abuse of history 71, 77, 79-80,

106,119 Academy of Sciences 72-3 agency 3, 7, 85,104,119-20 agriculture 12, 43-4, 94-5 alcohol 61, 94-5

Anthropocene 3-4,10,14, 23-4,

39, 67, 77 Arctic 11,129 Arendt, Hannah 40 authoritarianism 11, 26, 64, 68, 74, 84,109

babushka (grandmother)

98-101,104 Bakhtin, Mikhail 1,10 Baku 35

Balzer, Marjorie 133 Bauman, Zygmunt 3 Beck, Ulrich 9,11,101,142,156

Bloch, Marc 2 Braudel, Fernand 1-2 Bullitt, William 134-6 Buryatia 128,133 Bykov, Dmitry 78

capital flight 30, 60-62 Caucasus 35, 56, 68,123-4,

127-9,139 causality 93,106,131 Chayanov, Alexander 1, 94, 98

Chechnya 46,126,130-1 Chubais, Anatoly 34, 41-2 Cirillo, Lanfranco 82 civil society 9, 40 climate 4, 7,10-11,17, 23-4, 64, 74,106 awareness 4,13, change 7,11-13,17, 23, 64, 74,106

denialism 7, 11, 14-17 and war 23,106 coal 14,17-18, 21, 31-5,106 Cold War 19, 63, 89, 93,108,121, 125

collapse 6,17, 49, 58-60, 89, 93,

121-2,125 collective farms 43, 94,117 colonization 6, 38, 49,110-11, 122,125 internal colonization, 6, 22, 26,129

commoners 10, 42, 44, 57, 76-7, 81,137

conspiracy theories 10,15,

49-51, 67, 76,126 constitution 57,122,126,

130-3

Coronil, Fernando 24 corruption 5, 9-11,13,17, 22, 38, 42, 47-9, 52, 56, 61-4, 73, 78-84, 95; see also capital flight; elite; Navalny Covid-1911,14, 61, 74-7, 83, 89,

91-2, 94, 97 Creutzig, Felix 39 Crimean War 102,124-5

decarbonization 11,16-7,109 dedovschina, the grandfather

rule 100-1 defederation 121-3,127,130-4, 136-40

degeneration 38, 93-7,118-20 deindustrialization 17, 31

democracy 5, 35, 63-5,105, 127

demodernization 7-8, 40, 50 dependency by proxy 109 Donbas 51, 67,119,128-9 Dugin, Alexander 79

education 10-21, 29, 38-9, 46, 58, 62, 72-4, 87, 92,110; see also universities elections 46, 64, 70, 96 elite 7,10,15,18, 28-31, 37, 40, 49-52, 55-65, 73, 77-84, 103,136-7 emissions 6, 9-18, 20-1, 32, 39, 75

emotions 9, 77-80, 92,100; see also fetishism boredom 102,137 despair 2, 40, 78, 83, 94-6,

100-2,137 fear 71, 79, 87,121 happiness 20, 29, 96 jealousy 60, 84 mourning 2, 79 energy transition 4,10,12-18, 33,106

environment 11, 24, 48,131-2, estates (sosloviya) 57 ethnicity 5,102,112-13, H9> 122,

124,128-32,139 Evtushenkov, Vladimir 43 experts 5,10,12,19, 42,104-8 extraction 20, 25-8, 41, 45, 51, 58, 86,133

false news 2, 67, 70, 76,107 family 44, 61, 87-102 and domestic violence 97 and fatherlessness 92-3 nuclear 87-9

post-socialist 90, 92, 98-9 and social services 98-9 three-generational 99-101 see also abortions, babushka, Maternal Capital Program far right movements 7, 22, 26, 53, 80,131; see also Putinism Fat Years 36, 59, 97,103 Federal Security Service (FSB)

14, 43, 45, 47, 50 federative premium 122 Ferguson, Niall 106-7 Finland 25, 89, 96,107-9,123,

125,127-8,135,157 Finlandization 108-10 flaring 12, 20

fossil fuel 5, 8,13-22, 25, 31, 36, 51, 65, 80,105,136 its role in the Russian budget 17-18, 25, 36, 38, 86,129 Freud, Sigmund 113,115,136

Gaia 4-5

Gaidar, Egor 49-50 Gazprom 43, 45-8, 51-2, 66 gender 1, 7, 85-93; see also

inequality generation 2, 58, 72, 79, 92, 98-104,114,124,131,136

genocide 6,110-20; genocidal

tropes 117-19 Germany 21, 34-6, 48, 51, 53,

105,108-10,128,134 Gessen, Masha 8, 48 Giddens, Anthony 7-8, 64 gold reserves 7, 38, 41 Goldman, Marshall 26 grain 30, 36, 43, 80, 95.107, 139

growth 4,15. 20, 26-9, 37-9, 44, 49, 60, 63-5, 91,105, 130

Gustafson, Thane 105

hazing 100-1,155-6 health 19-21, 40, 58, 61, 74-7,

89, 94-8 hidden transcripts vs. public

displays 10, 50 Hirschman, Albert O. 96 Holodomor 80,110 homophobia 12, 67, 87,100 House, Edward 134 housing 41, 88-9, 98 Huevel, Katrina vanden 105 hydropower 33

ideology 11-13, 37,117,123; see

also Putinism Illarionov, Andrei 14-15, 63, 95

imperialism 6,12-13, 64-5, 68,

115-16,123-5,127-9 indigenous rights 129,132-4

inequality 1-3, 31» 4i> 44, 46, 56-8, 60, 63-4, 86, 98 and Russian regions 56; see also gender international rankings 19-21, 33, 72, 96

international trade 7,13,16, 25-6, 29-31, 36-8, 45, 51. 60-2, 86, 95,108-10,139 internet 69-71, 99 Iran 25, 33, 64, 95

Kant, Immanuel 2,108,141 katechon 77-81 Keynes, John Maynard 1, 63 Khanty 56,129,133 Khodorkovsky, Mikhail 45-6, 52

Koch brothers 14-15, 58 Konigsberg/Kaliningrad 2,128 Kouprianov, Alexei 75 Krugman, Paul 29 Kudrin, Aleksey 38-9, 74 Kuznets, Simon 87

labor 18, 22, 25-30, 37, 40, 57-8,

64, 86,105,136 labor theory of value 22, 25, 40 Latour, Bruno 3-5, 28,142 Lemkin, Raphael 110,114,157 Lenin, Vladimir 125,133,135-6 libertarianism 11-12,15-16, 22,

41, 56; see also taxation Lindner, Christian 105 Luhmann, Niklas 9

Marx, Karl 22, 63,115,124, Maternal Capital Program 91, 96

Mearsheimer, John 107 media 14, 66-9, 71, 76,116 paper media 66-71, 76 social media 70-1 television 46, 50, 52, 66-71 Medvedev, Dmitry 14-17, 39,

52, 82 Melnyk, Andrij 105 mercantilism 22, 26, 37-8 meritocracy 59, 63 methane 11-12, 20 middle class 30, 41, 44, 57-8, migration 20, 37, 60, 62, 83, 91,

97-8,131 military expenditure 27, 39 Mitchell, Timothy 28, 35,145 Mitscherlich, Alexander 92 mobilization 60, 62, 91, 97,128, 133

modernity 1, 3-8, 75, 96, 99-102,110,124 gaiamodernity 4-7, 9,10, 25,

32, 64,109,115 paleomodernity 3-6, 9,11, 25, 31-3, 64, 88 modernization theory 63-5 monopoly 27-9, 45, 47, 69 muckraking journalists 42, 46, 84

nationalism 37, 69 NATO 107,118

natural gas 7,12-18, 20-1, 25-39. 43-8, 51, 57. 86, 105-10,129,132-3 and long-term contracts 45, 48,109

and planned economy 45,109 natural resources 4-6,17, 20, 22, 25-9, 37. 41, 45, 57, 60, 64, 80,122,134 and the resource-bound state 25, 28-30, 85,109 Navalny, Alexei 46-7, 52, 81-4, 121

nemesis 2,12, 27, 48, 80,102,

107,122 Nemtsov, Boris 36 neoliberalism 16,19, 27, 35 nooscope 51

normalization (in scholarship)

19-22, 64,106-7 Norway 25-6, 33, 38-9, 61,128, 132

novels 67, 78,134

nuclear weapons 65,106,137-8

oil 7.11-8, 20-40, 43-8, 56-62, 64-6, 73, 81, 86-7, 95, 105-8,126-3,136-9 and geography, 129-30 and the Russian budget 18, 25,

36-8, 86,129 and labor, 86-7 oil prices 27-33, 36, 50-1, 59,

108-9 see also petrostate

oligarchs/oiligarchs 7, 30, 43, 47, 49, 52-3, 54-5, 62, 81-6, 103 OPEC 26-7

Orthodox Christianity 37, 63, 78-9

palaces 47, 52, 82 Paris Peace Conference 134-5, 139

pensions 17, 21, 38, 88, 90, 99 permafrost 11-12, 31 petromacho 86-7; see also gender

petrostate 24-31, 37-9, 51, 64, 87, 95,122 and deindustrialization 17,

31-4 and magic 24, 50 and monopoly 27-8 and oil export 26-9 Piketty, Thomas 56,147-8 pipelines 6,11, 35-6, 45, 48, 52,

59, 86,107,109,116,132 plagiarism 73-4, 77 Poland 70,123,128,141 Polanyi, Karl 1 political realism 107,137 pollution 4, 9-12, 75 Pomory 132 postwar 2, 35, 92 poverty 58, 98; see also

inequality predictions 106-8 Prigozhin, Evgeny 48

privatization 41-7, 58-9 of apartments, 41 loan-for-shares scheme 42, 69 vouchers 41-2 progress 3-4, 6, 29, 33, 40,109 Przeworski, Adam 64 public sphere 6,10, 25, 29, 58, 60, 62-84, 96,101,105,109 public goods vs. public bads 6, 30-1

Putin, Vladimir 3-4,11-14,18, 22, 30, 33-4, 41-3, 46-8, 51, 53, 58, 68, 70, 77-85, 95-6, 102-7,114,117-19,124-30, 136

Putinism 12-13,16, 45, 78, 100-2,127

Qatar 21, 25, 27, 57

race 6,110-11,113-14, Rand, Ayn 15, 63 Rawls, John 31 reflexivity 5,10,13-14 renewable energy 6, 33-4,110 revanchism 13,115-16,123, 125-7

revolution 5, 9,14,19, 32, 35, 62, 71, 80, 87, 94,123,125-6, 134

risk society 5,141 Rosneft 47, 50-1, 60 Ross, Michael 28-9, 86-7,

145-6 ruble 35-8, 95-7,108

Russian Empire 35, 57, 59, 78-9,

106,121-7,130,133 Russian Federation 39, 56, 59,

74,121-2,127-40 Russo-Ukrainian War 1, 3-4, 8-14,18-23, З2-4, 43, 51-З, 60-2, 71, 77-80, 85, 91-2, 97,102-8,114-20,124, 128-34,137-40

sanctions 12, 32, 39, 52, 61, 71, 95

Saudi Arabia 17, 20-1, 25-6, 64 Schmitt, Carl 8, 49, 63, 79, 86, 152

Scott, James 10 Sechin, Igor 43» 47, 51, 53, 60 self-fulfilling prophecies 10, 71 Sharov, Vladimir 78 Shldovsky, Victor 111 Shleifer, Andrei 42-3, 64 Siberia 11-13, 20, 26, 31, 34-7, 46-7, 50, 57, 75, 80-3, 95, 97,100,110-11,123,126, 128-9,133-6,139 Smash and Vengerov (pop

group) 82 Sorokin, Vladimir 78 Soros, George 46, 69, 74 Soviet Union 3,11-15, 26, 31-6, 41-6, 49-50, 55, 58-60, 66, 73, 76, 78, 88-9, 93-8,100, 103,108,121-7,130,133 Stalin, Josef 35, 42, 55, 78, 80, 103,112,117

Starovoitova, Galina 127,158 state, the 3-9, 20, 24, 26-30, 38-41, 48, 58, 62, 81; see also petrostate composite state 121-2,126 failed state 105,127 parasitic state 40-1,122 resource-dependent vs. labor- dependent state 28-31 stopmodernism 1, 7, 9, 67, 71, 76 structuration 5, 7-8,114 subsidiary plots 44 Surkov, Vladislav 67-8

taste 5-7,13, 81-2, 85, Tatarstan 35,126,130-1,136 taxation 22, 28-30, 36, 44, 48,

56-7, 63, 95,129 tax evasion 49, 56, 82 terra nullius 117-19 Tooze, Adam 105 Transborder Carbon Tax 18 Tregub, Sergei 47-8 Treisman, Daniel 64,144,146 Trotsky, Lev 5, 42 trust 9-11, 60, 71. 76-7, 94, 96

Ukraine 1, 3, 7-8,13-5,19, 21, 23, 27, 32-3, 46, 48, 50-1, 62, 68-71, 77-9, 84-7, 91,

102-15,118-22,125-31, 139-40 unearned money 64-5,137 universities 31-2, 42, 71-4,131 Utopia 5-6, 26, 80 Utrata, Jennifer 93,154

vaccines 76-7

Venezuela 24-6, 37, 47, 64, 95 vices 102

arrogance 10, 65 greed 22, 65, 87,102, poshly 82 sloth 87, 94 vanity 52-3, 82,137 Vishnevsky, Anatole 86, 94,155

waste 9-11, 20,132 Weber, Max 4 Wenar, Leif 132-3,159 Williams, Robbie 81-2 Wilson, Woodrow 134-6

yachts 30, 34, 43-4, 53~5, 82,

137-8 Yeltsin, Boris 36,130

Z (letter) 115-17; see also

fetishism Zubarevich, Natalya 129

"Etkind situates Putin's 2022 war in a much bigger story about Russian history and the country's role as a major oil producer in a world facing a climate crisis. A concise book packed with big ideas."

Shaun Walker, The Guardian

Putin's war is a "special operation" against modernity. The invasion has been directed against Ukraine, but the war has a broader target: the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor. By trading oil and gas, promoting Trump and Brexit, spreading corruption, boosting inequality and homophobia, subsidizing far- right movements and destroying Ukraine, Putin's clique aims at suppressing the ongoing transformation of modern societies.

9781509556588

Alexander Etkind distinguishes between Russia's pompous, weaponized paleomodernity, on the one hand, and the lean, decentralized gaiamodernity of the Anthropocene, on the other. Putin's clique has used various strategies - from climate denialism and electoral interference to war and genocide - to resist and subvert modernity. Working on political, cultural and even demographic levels, social mechanisms convert the vicious energy of the oil curse into all-out aggression. Dissecting these mechanisms, Etkind's brief but rigorous analyses of social structuration, cultural dynamics and family models reveal the agency that drives the Russian war against modernity. This short, sharp critique of the Russian regime combines political economy, social history and demography to predict the decolonizing and defederating of Russia.

Alexander Etkind is a professor at the Central European University in Vienna.

Cover illustration: Simon Levy/iStock Cover design: www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

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