The Yukos affair followed the capture of NTV, an independent television channel that had criticized the war in Chechnya and caricatured Putin. The NTV studio was stormed by police officers in 2001, and soon appropriated by the state-owned Gazprom. Nationalization of NTV and Yukos were the starting points of the long journey that culminated in Russia's annexation of Crimea, its meddling in the US elections and its war in Ukraine. By ordering political assassinations of whistleblow- ers such as Alexander Litvinenko (2006), Anna Politkovskaya (2006), Sergey Magnitsky (2009) and Alexei Navalny (2020), the Kremlin only confirmed their shocking allegations. In the West, dozens of books were written about Russia's klep- tocracy. But other schemes were too big to reveal. Though well-informed about what was happening in the country, the international community accepted even the most egregious manifestations of Putin's rule. Privatization was the mother of corruption; renationalization was its almighty, patriarchal father.
Led by Igor Sechin, the state-owned Rosneft company appropriated the Yukos oil fields. A linguist by training and a former KGB officer, Sechin had begun working with Putin in 1994. Aside from oil, he worked on a nuclear energy program for Venezuela, an arms deal with France, and negotiations with the Trump presidential campaign. While these projects failed, the renationalization of Russian oil was accomplished. Combining his formal control of the largest Russian oil company with his informal command of the FSB, Sechin personified the double monopoly of energy and violence that constituted the Russian state. Rosneft was the second-largest Russian company after Gazprom. The duality of oil and gas was mirrored in two rival structures, with Putin their indispensable arbiter.
In 2006, a new name appeared in this story: Sergei Tregub. A colonel in military intelligence, Tregub was tasked with reorganizing Yukos's assets. One of the most secretive Russian oligarchs, he passed the Yukos oil fields in Siberia on to Rosneft. Alexei Navalny's team investigated Tregub in June 2022, while Navalny was in a high-security prison. Working for fifteen years as Putin's fixer, Tregub built neo-baroque palaces across the country, from the Black Sea to the Altai, using money embezzled from Gazprom and Rosneft. Operating through dozens of shell companies, Tregub and his people were the formal owners of Putin's properties. Tregub also owned shares in insurance companies and other businesses; his personal wealth was estimated at three billion dollars.13
In command of armed men who received their salaries from state agencies, he secured property rights for his bosses in the unstable environment they created for others.
Symbolically, Putin's most notorious crony, Evgeny Prigozhin, began his career as Putin's personal chef. Prigozhin organized supplies to the Russian military, a troll factory that churned out propaganda for Trump, and mercenary camps in Syria, Central Africa and Ukraine. Moving from kitchens at home to military camps abroad was quick and easy for people like Prigozhin. Failing to pay taxes, flouting regulations and possessing unlimited resources, these princes of darkness preached and practiced a turbo-charged Machiavellian politics with the sole purpose of spreading their corrupt influence. They had no fear of the state because they were the state. Inept managers, they were efficient corrupters.
In supplying Germany and other European countries with gas, Gazprom violated European rules by not allowing other suppliers to use its pipelines and reservoirs. Controlling about one-third of the continental market, it based its operations on long-term contracts, sometimes fixed for as long as twenty-five years. Several times, the European Commission questioned these practices and obliged Gazprom to follow the rules.14 It decided that all long-term contracts should be terminated by 2049, which was still pretty-long term. In 2019, the European Parliament adopted binding legislation that required ownership of pipelines entering EU territory to be separated from ownership of the gas supply.15 Again, Gazprom sabotaged the policy. It was only the consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian War that broke the fossilized spine of Russia.
Corruption, Masha Gessen wrote, was subservient to cruelty. "My biggest problem with Putin was not that he stole and amassed wealth; it was that he killed people, both by waging war and by fielding assassins."16 The stolen wealth helped the corrupted state pay for its troops and assassins, but it also brought its own nemesis: because of corruption, no word in
Russia - no document, blueprint or spreadsheet - meant what it said. Unpunished and limitless, Russia's corruption boosted its cruelty but also hollowed it out: the weapons barely worked, the armor did not protect, inventions did not materialize, and soldiers despised their superiors. As the Ukrainian leaders realized early in the course of the war, Russian corruption was their best ally.
Combined with the liberalization of capital movement, free-floating corruption changed international relations. Increasingly liquid and flammable, this oil-like universe ceased to comply with Carl Schmitt's claim that distinguishing between friends and foes is essential for politics. This old- fashioned idea assumed that loyalties could not be bought, and that political actors were solid bodies rather than liquid flows. Watching how the Russian oiligarchs turned their foes into friends through a combination of carrots and sticks - bribes and blackmail - we leap from Schmitt's political universe to Navalny's. Polluting nature, carbon also corrupts humans: this double action is Gaia's revenge. Stolen wealth generates more evil per dollar than earned wealth. Every carbon-generated, tax-avoiding dollar has greater bribing and killing power than a labor-produced, regulated dollar. Seeking growth, corruption is imperialist in the same way as colonization was.
Enter conspiracy
The explosive growth of inequality led to prolific mythmaking: every national elite came up with its own fables to explain its privileged position among the populace.17 Emotionally, the growing inequality provoked discontent, hatred and guilt. Behaviorally, it led to outright aggression. Cognitively, it led to conspiracy theories.
The memory of the Soviet collapse haunted the Russian rulers. Egor Gaidar, the mastermind of the Russian reforms, noted that falling oil prices had buried the Soviet Union.18 It took only one interpretative step to move from Gaidar's scholarly theorizing to a form of magical thinking about the global plotters who were bent on destroying Russia. The higher the price of oil, the more aggressive were the words and deeds of the Russian authorities. Conversely, when the oil price fell, they mellowed.19
From hidden transcripts of the secretive elite, these fables turned into public displays that defined official policies.20 Seeing the entire world as an enlarged Moscow, the elite fueled new cycles of demodernization. In 2008, the TV anchor Mikhail Leontyev argued that the financial crisis was an American plot against Russia. In a typical move from fantasy to officialdom, Leontyev was later appointed the spokesman and vice-president of Rosneft. In 2015, the FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev blamed the Obama administration for initiating the Ukrainian crisis. The Americans' objective, he claimed, was to capture Siberia's natural riches; this was known, Patrushev said, because the FSB could read the minds of US officials.21 In 2019, Sergei Glazyev, Putin's economic advisor, alleged that President Zelensky was going to eliminate Russian-speakers in Ukraine and settle Israeli Jews there instead: this was the plan the Americans had laid out for the country.22 Vladimir Yakunin, a former KGB officer and head of the Russian Railways corporation, stated that the global financial system was controlled from a glamorous room in a Manhattan skyscraper which he, Yakunin, had once visited. Anton Vaino, Putin's powerful chief of staff, believed in a mysterious device, the "nooscope," which controls interactions between people, the economy and nature. Tapping into global consciousness, the nooscope supposedly "detects and registers changes in the biosphere and in human activity."23 Vaino's deputy, the former prime minister Sergei Kiriyenko, turned out to be an adept of "methodology," a Soviet method of behavior modification through "organizational games."24 The hyperactive Kiriyenko later played a leading role in the war effort, reorganizing the occupied territories in the Donbas according to his "methodological' templates. His boss Vaino was largely invisible to the public. Nobody knew what he was doing: a nooscope made flesh.