Starting the war was a deliberate decision of a kind that Carl Schmitt, the Kremlin's half-acknowledged guide in political theory, deemed essential for political practice. The war did not follow from any rational calculus that existed in the past, and it changed the grounds for all such calculations in the future. The actions of certain people and institutions defined the life, work or death of millions of other people.9 This is structuration in practice. Agents create structures that shape new actions, and these agents themselves change in the process. They may or may not have a plan; and if they have one they may not follow it. But in making such decisions, agents follow their tastes, which stabilize with each decision. In this way, aesthetic and cultural preferences enter the political realm, shape economic relations and drive history.
Trust
Modern nations evolve in a delicate balance between civil society and the state.10 There is a subjective mood that holds them together: trust. It is a feeling, a sentiment, that underlies structural formations. As German sociologist Niklas Luhmann aptly remarked: "A complete absence of trust would prevent [one] even getting up in the morning."11 Both before and during the war, millions of Russians had this feeling that spoiled their mornings, and evenings as well. An absence of trust destroys an individual; when it affects many people, it destroys their society. Breakdowns of trust are abrupt and catastrophic, and they are known as revolutions.
Trust can be imposed by an all-powerful state: historians of Russia speak of forced or imitated trust.12 But if this state is in decline, your only choice is between silence and protest. Real change can take decades, and nothing but corruption and emissions would be produced during this period. "The expectation of catastrophes undermines trust," wrote Ulrich Beck.13
For paleomodernity, the main example of trust was credit: multiple borrowers were equally related to a lender, and mutual trust was about individual responsibility. For gaiamodernity, trust is about sorted garbage, clean water and a peaceful country. People can only achieve this together, through their coordinated efforts. It is a collective responsibility that involves the authorities as well as citizens. Dealing with pollution, pandemic, or dictatorship, people again live in the state of nature as if they were in Hobbes's old fantasy, but this time it is really about the state and nature.
Our situation is close to that of new wilderness, in which trust is dispersed and selective. Trust your friends and test them; hate your enemies. Remember postmodernism, in which all cultural things were said to be equal? It was a lie - the real threat is stopmodernism. But its features are not yet clear, or at least they were not clear before the war. This is the time for a new reflexivity. No more blind trust: the risks are calculable, as are the countermeasures. Trust your neighbor not to pollute your air, or spread the virus any more than is inevitable; but always check just in case. And trust your authorities in the same way. It is their duty to protect you. If they produce more emissions rather than less, then they should go. This is the time for a new moral autonomy. Trust yourself, and you will get up in the morning.
To survive the Anthropocene we have to trust the experts. We live in a world of probabilities that we cannot perceive. It is the experts who tell us about climate change, viruses, pollution and other challenges. Rarely can we test their data, but we are eager to discuss their conclusions and recommendations. This is how the public sphere, a crucial mechanism of gaiamoder- nity, works. Distrust splits the public sphere into fragments that refuse to communicate with one another. It creates a cultural gap between the commoners on the one hand, and the experts and authorities on the other. Commoners do not trust them and do not comply; sabotage, the weapon of last resort, is not as weak as it seems. In many situations, distrust works as a self-fulfilling prophecy. You feel that sorting your rubbish isn't worthwhile, so you don't do it. The unsorted garbage ends up in the same place as the sorted, confirming your indifference to the issue. If you do not get a jab the world will not end either. You may get sick or die, but only the experts will know why. .
This cultural gap between the elite and the commoners never stays empty. The folk fill it with immaterial subtleties - popular culture (Mikhail Bakhtin), hidden transcripts (James Scott) or conspiracy theories, as we now call them. If the experts are too distant, the elite too arrogant, and the gap too great, conspiracy theories tend to materialize in a self-fulfilling manner. Russia's corruption, inequality and bad governance converged in the destruction of social trust.14 Tragically, this effect reached a climax at exactly the point when trust was more important than ever: on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic, in the context of the global decarbonization, and during the undeclared war.
Putinism in Eurasia
Putin's aim was to restore the Soviet-style paleomodernity - the reign of oil, steel and smoke, the majesty of military power, the coerced unity of the people. The Soviet Union based its power and glory on socialism - an ideal of brotherhood and the equality of all. Although it failed to materialize, this ideal was relatively effective in containing corruption. Putin and his people wished to combine the Soviet allure with post-Soviet graft. Their reenactment of paleomodernity merged legacies from the Soviet era - resource waste, cynicism and distrust - with the radical novelty of massive and ever-increasing inequality. Ulrich Beck wrote that "social inequalities and climate change are two sides of the same coin";15 resistance to them also had one and the same origin. Confronting these two major challenges - climate and inequality - the Kremlin sang to the tune of libertarian, denialist conservatism. Imitating or reinventing this ideology, the Russian rulers supported far-right movements around the world.
Russia's environmental problems were immense. The Global North and the Arctic proved to be even more vulnerable to climate change than the South. In 1991, permafrost covered two thirds of the Russian territory, but has been in retreat ever since. Cities, pipelines and railways sat on this melting land.16 Collapsing randomly, the permafrost released enormous amounts of methane, which accelerated global warming. In 2021, almost twenty million hectares of Siberian forest were destroyed by wildfires; it was Russia's most destructive wildfire season ever. From the tundra to the taiga, Siberian ecosystems were changing from being carbon sinks to being active emitters. In terms of its vulnerability to climate crisis, Russia was comparable to Canada and Alaska; but only in Russia did major cities such as Yakutsk and Norilsk sit on melting permafrost.
The war and sanctions of 2022 increased the flaring of natural gas, a major source of pollution. Symbolic of the excess characteristic of the oil and gas trade, the flaring was ubiquitous: since it was difficult to shut down gas wells or preserve the gas, the only way to get rid of the excess was to burn it off into the air. The less gas the Russian corporations were able to sell the more they flared on the spot or somewhere along the line. In August 2022, just one Russian compressor station near the Finnish border was burning ten million dollars worth of Siberian gas every day.17 In the way of nemesis, this added to the local pollution around St. Petersburg, Putin's native city, before it contributed to global emissions.
Watching the Siberian fires, the retreat of the permafrost and the massive release of methane, Putinism blessed Russia's role as an energy empire. Insisting that oil and gas exports were essential for the national economy, experts speculated on the possible benefits of climate change for Russia.18 As a northern country with an unstable agriculture, would it not be better for the country to be a little warmer? Wouldn't the opening of the Northern Sea Route to China realize the ancient dreams of Ivan the Terrible? Along with climate denialism, other components of Putinism included cultural conservatism, homophobia, economic inequality and graft. They were all connected.19 In July 2022, Putin explained the energy transition underway in European countries by their "love of non-traditional relations," a Russian euphemism for homosexuality; here, climate denialism merged smoothly with homophobia.20 Machismo was a persistent feature of Putin's speeches; in August that year, he said that only masculinity could protect the governments of the world from the designs of American imperialism.21