Russia Against Modernity

Russia Against Modernity

Russia Against Modernity

ALEXANDER ETKIND

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Copyright © Alexander Etkind 2023

The right of Alexander Etkind to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act

1988.

First published in 2023 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5657-1 ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5б58-8(рЬ)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948537

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Contents

Acknowledgments vi

Introduction 1

Modernity in the Anthropocene 3

Petrostate 24

Parasitic Governance 40

The So-Called Elite 55

The Public Sphere 66

Gender and Degeneration 85

Putin's War 102

Defederating Russia 121

160

Notes 141

Index

Acknowledgments

A few decades of observations and debates lie behind this book, but its text was written over several months during the Russian invasion in Ukraine in 2022.1 am grateful to the institutions that supported me during those years and months: the European University Institute in Florence; the College of the Future at the University of Konstanz; and the Central European University in Vienna.

John Thompson at Polity Press gave an (almost) unconditional approval to my proposal. Pavel Kolar, Gruia Badescu and Aleida Assmann helped me find the proper words for my thoughts during our discussions in Konstanz. Juliane Furst and several anonymous reviewers read the manuscript and provided invaluable feedback. Dirk Moses and Michael Berdy commissioned me to write articles that I recycled for this book. Tim Clark, John Kennedy, Anatoly Belogorsky and Maria Bratischeva generously helped with criticisms and editing. Mark Etkind, always an inspiration, polished some of my formulations. Several generations of students and friends in St. Petersburg, Cambridge, Lviv, Florence, Riga, Vienna and elsewhere will find here my responses to their questions and objections.

Introduction

This is a lean book about lean modernity and its pompous, archaic enemies. It is a wartime book, and the reader will sense my impatience. However, I started formulating this narrative long before the Russian war in Ukraine resumed in February 2022. The chapters consist of my briefs on Russia's energy, climate action, Covid response, public sphere, demography, gender issues, inequality and war. The last chapter imagines an adventurous though increasingly realistic project of defederat- ing Russia. At the time of writing, the war was not over. Since I was sure it would end at some point, better sooner than later, I decided to write the whole text in the past tense.

I wished this book to be a short and sharp text, a pamphlet rather than a treatise, written with a playfulness that would help the reader grasp its gruesome themes. Peace is good for complexity; war brings clarity. Nothing cleanses the palate better than war. It changes everything - first the present, then the future and, finally, the past. In developing my concept of Russia's "sЈo/?modernism," I draw on political economy, intellectual history, international relations and much else.

Some of my favorite authors - Alexander Chayanov, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Polanyi, Mikhail Bakhtin and Fernand

Braudel - wrote their greatest books during a major war. Despair is critical - it zooms in on the worst parts of life and brings them to fore where the hidden can be revealed and the invisible analyzed. Compassion for some and contempt for others reduce academic prudence to smoking ashes. Mourning consists of memories, visualizations and speculations: How could this have happened? Could it have been prevented? But this mimesis is also nemesis: How to resist and overcome? What kind of revenge would break a new circle of violence?

Postwar periods are intellectually productive: they create ideas that feed the next generations, though they do not prevent these new generations from starting another war.¹ Postwar periods are good for investors and architects but also for philosophers and historians: shaken by the war, the world must be rebuilt, rebooted and re-anchored all over again. Teaching in Konigsberg when the Russian Empire annexed the city for the first time, Immanuel Kant produced his Critiques of human reason after foreign troops had left his land. Throughout his life, Kant was committed to working towards Perpetual Peace, but Russia refuted his project; few places on the earth have been as distant from peace as Kaliningrad.² In 1921 in Strasbourg, another city in the process of changing hands, Marc Bloch discovered the lethal power of lies: "Items of false news ... have filled the life of humanity ... False news reports! ... in every country, at the front as in the rear, we saw them being born and proliferating... The old German proverb is relevant: 'When war enters the land, then there are lies like sand.'"³

In a desert of lies there are wells of truth that create oases of peace, unless the sand recaptures them. We are the animated pieces of that sand and that water, and the choice between them is ours. This is the story we live in.

Modernity in the Anthropocene

Before and during the Russo-Ukrainian War that began in 2014, modernity was as big an issue for Russia as agency was for Ukraine. A harbinger of progress - this was how its sympathizers thought about the Soviet Union, and Putin's Russia wished to be its heir. In 1992, Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish-born sociologist who saw it all, wrote that "communism was modernity's most devout, vigorous and gallant champion ... It was under communist, not capitalist, auspices that the audacious dream of modernity... was pushed to its radical limits: grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature."¹ In this conglomeration of steel, oil and gunpowder, there was very little place for men and women. The all-powerful state subordinated both people and nature to a turbocharged modernity that looked increasingly stagnant, even obsolete, with every passing decade. This was paleomodernity, and the Soviet Union was its most vigorous champion.

Argument

Putin's war was a "special operation" against the Ukrainian people, their statehood and culture. It was also a broader operation against the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor.

Any concept of modernity comprises descriptive and normative components. The Anthropocene has accelerated their fusion. A new type of modernity - reflexive, sustainable, decentralized - would help us to survive the Anthropocene.² Negotiated between the planet and its humans, the new order is very different from the previous types of modernity, such as Max Weber's bureaucratized modernity of the late nineteenth century, or the paleomodernity of the early twentieth. I call it gaiamodernity, deriving the name from Gaia, the planetary system of life and matter that includes us all.³ Paleomodernity defined progress in terms of the expanding use of nature: the more resources were used and the more energy consumed, the higher was a civilization. For gaiamodernity, in contrast, the further advancement of humanity requires less energy used and less matter consumed per every new unit of work and pleasure. The two types of modernity present opposite relations between nature and progress.