"I think this is the last Russian war: it will lead to the collapse of the Russian Federation." Interview with historian Alexander Etkind

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12 min

June 22, 2015

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Source: Cold

Alexander Etkind is a historian, philologist, professor at the European University Institute in Florence. Prior to that, he taught at Cambridge for many years. His books on colonization, intellectual history, and cultural memory have been translated into many languages ​​and help Western intellectuals understand Russia. In his new book, Russia Against Modernity, Etkind presents the invasion of Ukraine as part of the Russian state’s big war against progress—the environmental, social, and cultural challenges of the 21st century. The editor of Kholod, Maxim Conspiracy, spoke with Etkind about what kind of war this was and when it would end.

“Russia against modernity” - explain the essence of this confrontation.

“This is a new confrontation. Of course, Russia had problems with modernity both in the 18th and 19th centuries, but now modernity itself has become new. This is a direct result of the climate crisis, and now COVID and other natural hazards have been added to it. New modernity is a direct response to the confrontation between society and nature. In previous centuries, nature seemed endless - it could be mastered and conquered, but now we have come to a dead end.

Why is Russia opposed to this modernity? Yes, simply because it is completely dependent on the export of its carbon feedstock, which is aptly called fossil fuels. Any energy transition programs deprive the Russian Federation of its usual sources of income. This is the essence of this confrontation, everything else is its various consequences.

You write that the former world is the “world of Leviathan”, and the present one is the “world of Gaia”. The Gaia Hypothesis is an interesting theory according to which all living things on Earth form a huge superorganism that supports the existence of the planet. Do you believe in this idea?

— Yes, I believe in it and have been teaching it for several years. In its current form, this idea was formulated by the great recently deceased philosopher Bruno Latour. Of course, it is partly metaphorical, but partly literal. And this literalness grows as we move towards a head-on collision with nature. Nature-Gaia comes to life and begins to resist, strike back as we approach its limits - the planetary limits of economic growth.

You list environmental, medical, social, gender, cultural challenges, separated by commas, and link them to the current war. Explain this connection.

- There is such a popular - I would even say, dominant - theory of multi-crisis, it was formulated by the economic historian and public intellectual Adam Tooze. He draws large polygons that demonstrate the connection and collision of different crises and their transformation into one big one.

It is assumed that among these crises there is no primary, secondary, tertiary, and so on - they are all equal, develop simultaneously and reinforce each other, as in a vicious circle. In this sense, war is another side of this complex polygon.

I agree with much of this, but it seems to me that this polygon must stand on something, something is its base, and something secondary follows from the primary. To understand what to do with a multi-crisis and where to start, you need to understand what it stands for. Build a hierarchy of problems, understand which crisis is the main one and how it generates the rest. I believe that the main one is the climate crisis, from which decarbonization follows, new forms of inequality and much more.

Explain how the climate crisis led to war. When Putin announced the invasion, he did not say anything about the climate.

- Putin did not speak, but I speak. This is actually what my book is about. The Russian Federation grew, plump and fat by 100% due to the export of fossil fuels. This is the only thing that gave profit, which was then redistributed to other industries. From these profits the military program was also financed, the scope and quality of which we now understand better than before.

But a significant part of this profit went to the so-called "elite" (I always put this word in quotation marks) - several thousand families of supreme administrators, managers, distributors of national wealth, who used the superprofits to buy the world's longest yachts, the largest palaces, the most tasteless luxury items and so on, doing this both in Russia and abroad. Pre-war Russia is one of the leading countries in the world both in terms of social inequality and capital flight.

All the decarbonization programs, the energy transition, the cross-border carbon tax, which should be introduced as early as 2026, all deprived Russia of profit. By 2030, Russia should have lost at least half of its [oil and gas] revenues, and by 2050, all of them.

The adequate response to this would have been to diversify the economy, focus on human capital, education - so that people earn more money for themselves and their country - but instead of all this, war began as a preemptive strike. This is the logic of my book.

Do you think Putin reasoned that way?

- I understand this in some detail - was there really such a planned plan? After all, at first the Russian authorities simply did not believe in international environmental programs; speaking in Russian, she went into the negative. Then there were ideas that something could be earned on this (and, by the way, it really was possible, because emissions trading works, although not for Russia). All this was actively discussed both in the presidential administration and in the government, but it required great diplomatic and political efforts.

In the end, a different path was chosen. Was it a well-thought-out plan, a spontaneous decision, or a chain of decisions? In my book, if you remember, there is a chapter "Taste instead of a plan" - about how the taste preferences of politicians influence their decisions, giving them the appearance of consistency. In it, I describe how "taste preferences" such as homophobia or big-small preference serve as a political planning function. That is, one taste decision leads to another, another to a third, and so on (in probability theory, this is called “Markov chains”), but the choice of the path at each of these forks is determined by the same taste of the ruling clique.

In general, I see it like this: I don't think it was a plan, but I think it was a conscious chain of decisions that evolved over decades.

In Viktor Tsoi's song about modernity, there are such lines: “You don’t understand anything and don’t want to change anything” - do you describe something like this logic of the Russian government?

- Rather, the second part of this phrase. There is a point of view, partly reliable, that low oil prices in the late 1980s led to the collapse of the Soviet Union - the entire current Russian “elite” learned from this experience. Now it's not about prices: prices will only grow, but about taxes, duties, restrictions, embargoes, and a ceiling on energy prices. The former life will no longer continue, the usual life due to this life becomes impossible, and the habitual user of the life has understood this. This realization led him to make desperate decisions to thwart these changes.

The closest historical analogy is the "opium wars" waged by the British Empire against China in the 19th century. The empire sold huge quantities of Indian opium to China, the profits went to London. At some point, the Chinese authorities decided to stop this trade, believing that this would lead to the degradation of the population, in much the same way that European buyers began to refuse oil today. And in both cases, the seller starts a war, the purpose of which is not to capture, but to impose on buyers the previous trade relations.

The main national idea is “to live as before”?

- Not just "to live as before", but "to live as richly as before." The Russian "elite" is accustomed to living very richly, richer than anyone in the world - they consider this an inherited right, a right given by God himself: we insist on this right, we are the chosen people, and they are trying to deprive us of this right. We were ready to bargain with them, we wanted to be kind. But Putin decided: if you don’t want it in a good way, we’ll be in a bad way. And they started badly.

This, of course, is one of the explanations for the war with Ukraine. War is an event of great significance. Such historical events always have many explanations, which are also combined into one logic, and then the logic of war acts. In my book, I describe this logic, reaching both the genocide and the possible end of this war - that is, the military defeat of the Russian Federation, which it will not be able to survive. I think that the world community will not tolerate Russian oddities and excesses, as it tolerated them before the war. I think that this is the last Russian war: it will lead to the collapse of the Russian Federation.

You talk about the great significance of the war with Ukraine, but at the same time you write in the book that it is only part of a big “Anthropocene war”, the very war of man against nature. Doesn't this thought diminish the significance and horror of the Russian invasion?

“Perhaps Ukrainians can understand this in such a way that I belittle the significance of their war. They now really believe that not only the Putin clique, but the entire Russian people hate Ukrainians in a special way. They believe in the ethnic hatred of Russians.

I do not believe in this. I believe that this is a national mythology that is characteristic of wartime, but does not correspond to historical and political realities. And perhaps this ethnic mythology is harmful to the practical politics of Ukraine. I think it would be better for Ukraine to focus on the Russian government and its overthrow, on the understanding that when the regime ends, then the war will end. Then there will be an opportunity for new political realities throughout the Eurasian continent and in the wider world. And we will all thank Ukraine. This is how my book ends.

But, in fairness, your book is not called "Putin - against modernity", but "Russia against modernity".

- Well, yes. But I call the current war Putin's, not Russia's. Russia is a state, but Russia is also a country. I do not blame the Russian people, although in this context, perhaps, it would be fair. But I think that there are no bad students - there are bad teachers. People need to be educated, just taught, starting from kindergarten and ending with universities, so that they treat nature, garbage, fuel, electricity, people, and the world in a different way.

Other peoples have embraced these new ways of behaving like garbage sorting more readily. Yes, this is also a question of infrastructure - what kind of tanks are in the yard - but above all, this is a question of education. There are no bad or good nations, there is good and bad education. As a person who has been working in the field of education all my life, I understand this very clearly.

You write that the modern state and people are bound by trust. Don't you think that the Russian people have full confidence in their state? Even opinion polls, for all their vulnerability now, record a very high index of Russians' trust in both Putin and the army.

“Trust is a fundamental issue in the social sciences. It is not measured by sociological surveys in any country, and even more so in a totalitarian one. Now in Russia, sociology must be silent, because it is the same servant of the regime, like the army, like the press, like the courts. All this cannot be trusted.

And trust must be measured, for example, at the base rate of a loan. Here you borrow money from a friend: if you trust each other, the rate on this debt will be zero. And in Russia, loans are issued at a very high percentage - this is an indicator of trust.

Well, as the famous German sociologist Niklas Luhmann wrote: “If there is no trust in your country, you don’t want to wake up in the morning.” I think that many in Russia are now experiencing this.

Another idea that you describe in your book is the idea of ​​“normality” for Russia. You call it the key one after the collapse of the USSR. Did the idea fail?

- The idea of ​​"normality" was the dominant idea of ​​a certain circle of Western Sovietologists, Kremlinologists and experts on Russia. I am very critical of this idea, but it was a massive undertaking that, as I write, was like an intellectual "Marshall Plan."

All indexes of spending on education, indexes of happiness, mortality, difference in life expectancy between men and women in Russia, to put it mildly, are abnormal. They do not correspond to a country that until recently was considered “normal” in scientific articles, and the World Bank transferred it to the category of “rich countries”.

Wasted advances?

No, it was like that until 2014. In Russian folklore, this is called "fat years." These were not vain advances, it was a statement of economic growth without understanding the nature of this phenomenon. Although the sources of this growth were well known then and even more understandable now. In the 21st century, economic growth due to the export of carbon raw materials cannot be considered “normal”.

Contrasting Russia with progress, you nevertheless write that Putinism is an international phenomenon. Explain exactly what you mean. Already now it seems that Putinism is isolated almost by the walls of one office.

- Now yes. But this is a direct result of the war. Before the war, this was not the case. You remember how world leaders came to Putin and sat at this idiotic table.

The most important moment was related to the presidency of Donald Trump. It was an international victory for Putinism as a system of tastes and preferences, as a role model. The great country of America fell under the influence of Russia and voted for the Putinist. But the second time it didn't work.

However, Trump may be right to say that if he were president, there would be no war. Other sources of influence and influence would work. In turn, if there had been no war, internal Putinism could, if not flourish, then exist and be regarded as a solid normal phenomenon. The war was the fatal mistake of this regime.

Don't you think that because of the war, Putinism also got a second wind, it's just that they don't call it Putinism? Who cares now about the hypothesis of Gaia and the superorganism? Everyone is increasing military budgets, they think first of all about security, state strategies are becoming primitive. These are all completely Putin's ideas, contrary to modernity.

- It's like that. Yes, on the one hand, the war undermined the Russian economy and Russia, no matter how much oil it exports on unmarked tankers, will still drown in its fossil fuels. But in a broader sense, yes, Putinism achieves its goals: the deadlines of European climate programs are likely to be delayed, hostile plans will not come true or will come true later than promised. The war has reached its end. The remilitarization of Europe will require a large amount of fuel and lubricants. There is no doubt about it.

It's not just about the materials. This, it turns out, is the victory of that very archaic thinking over the modern one. Russia wins modernity?

- No. This time it won't work.