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.