During this period, climate action took neoliberal forms which were amenable to the Russian rulers: as a big country with a low population density, Russia could gain from the new trading schemes. In 2009, the Russian government issued the Climate Doctrine, which acknowledged the manmade character of climate change. At the Copenhagen Climate Conference of that year, President Medvedev promised to increase Russian energy efficiency by 40 percent. But the conference ended in chaos, and Medvedev's program of modernization was not fulfilled.
A real decarbonization has never been on the Kremlin agenda. The collapse of the USSR and the decline of Russia's economy had reduced emissions within its territory without any effort on the part of its rulers. In 2013, the Kremlin set a national target to reduce emissions to 75 percent of the 1990 rate; while this sounded ambitious, in fact Russia's emissions were already less than 70 percent of that rate.26 The Russian rulers survived the deindustrialization of their country only by the increasing the volume of its carbon exports. Since the exported oil, gas and coal were burned in other countries, the resulting emissions were somebody else's problem. As Russian emissions would be seen to decrease while global emissions continued to rise, Europe, China and the rest of the world would have to pay emission transfers to Russia. But few wanted to pay twice for their fuel.
In 2015, Sergey Donskoy, minister of natural resources, estimated potential Russian losses from climate change at 1-2 percent of GDP per year.27 However, the proportion of Russian GDP made up by the oil, gas and coal trades was much higher, at 15-25 percent a year. Unlike the rest of its GDP, which was the result of the hard work of Russian citizens and partially returned to them in salaries and pensions, the carbon revenue directly enriched the government. A real decarbonization program adopted by the European and global economies would eliminate these state profits - the source of the Kremlin's official expenditures as well as its subterranean corruption. In 2016, new hacks and leaks from Russia helped to elect Donald Trump, the climate denier in chief. In 2018, at the Katowice Climate Change Conference, Trump's America, Putin's Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait blocked the adoption of a binding resolution.
Year after year, fossil fuels made up more than two-thirds of Russia's exports and funded more than half of its federal budget. The lion's share of this funding came from Europe, which in 2021 bought three-quarters of Russia's gas exports and two-thirds of its oil exports. The money was crucial for the stability of Russia's currency, for its military spending, for maintaining the luxurious lifestyle of its elite, and for importing consumer goods for the general population. For the EU, Russian exports provided about 40 percent of its gas, about half of its coal and a quarter of its oil. The relationship was symbiotic, though Russia depended on it more than Europe. The EU's planned energy transition would mean a replacement of products extracted from nature with goods created by labor. This would result in a major reduction of Russian profits. Despite all the talk of modernization and diversification, there was no plan for substituting Russia's fossil fuel exports with any other source of revenue. And if there were hopes of cheating the planet through the EU Trading Emissions Scheme (2009), there would be no way around the EU Transborder Carbon Tax (2021).
Planned for implementation in 2026, the Carbon Tax would impact the cost of all high-carbon products, including steel, cement, aluminum and petrochemicals. Non-EU producers of these commodities would pay 75 per metric ton of emissions occurring during the production of them. The effect on Russian exports would be equivalent to an additional customs charge of 16 percent.28 In April 2021, the EU declared its commitment to reducing emissions by half by 2030 and to zero by 2050. This would mean proportional reductions of oil and coal purchases. Gas, a cleaner fuel, would keep flowing for another decade. "You see what is happening in Europe. There is hysteria and confusion in the markets," said Putin in October 2021.29 By this point, Russian war preparations were in full swing.
Normalization
"Russia is a normal country" was the slogan of a whole generation of Western experts. The Cold War had been settled, and academic interests switched to the Third World. The liberal left presented Russia as a decent partner and a reliable counterweight to the United States. A neoliberal idea of normalization colored studies in the history, sociology and politics of Russia: if an empirical work needed an ideological impetus, the notion of normalization provided it. A good example is an essay by two leading American scholars, an economist and a political scientist, "A Normal Country: Russia after Communism," published in 2005, right after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.30 I could cite hundreds of other examples. The normalization of Russia was a massive and high-profile endeavor, an intellectual equivalent of the Marshall Plan. For many observers, it was only Russia's genocidal war with Ukraine that changed this understanding.
In 2012, the World Bank upgraded Russia to a high-income economy but reversed this decision two years later.31 Average Russian incomes had been falling since 2012, which happened in very few other countries. In terms of median incomes, Russia ranked 46th in 2021 - lower than Lebanon or Bulgaria. For that same year, the Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity ranked Russia 51st, between India and Vietnam, and far lower than its geographic neighbors Finland and China.32 Health spending per capita was even worse: 104th place, on par with Nigeria and Uzbekistan. Predictably, Russia's ranking for life expectancy was similar: 105th. Underspending on education was gruesome: though a richer country, Russia spent less per capita on education than Turkey, Mexico or Latvia. When measured on the portion of GDP spent on educational institutions, Russia ranked 125th.33 Russia's ranking on the Freedom of Press Index was pathetic from the outset (121st in 2002), and has only got worse since. It ranked 148th in 2020, between Palestine and Burma, and 158th in 2022, alongside Afghanistan.34
Ecologically, Russia was the fourth greatest polluter in the world; China topped the list but Russian emissions per capita were much higher.35 Russia's ecological problems - smog in the capital and garbage in the countryside - stuck in the mind of anyone who had visited the country. Siberia had been extensively logged and ravaged by fires. Flaring gas torches and methane leaks created massive emissions. The biggest protest Russia saw during the 2010s was sparked by a plan to ship millions of tons of residential waste from Moscow to the pine forests of the Archangelsk region.
It was no wonder, then, that Russians were so unhappy: in 2020, one global happiness index placed Russia 78th, between the silent Turkmenistan and the protesting Hong Kong.36 Russia was among those countries with the highest rates of suicide, fatal road accidents and industrial accidents. All these contributed to Russia's pathetic performance in population growth, which reflects rates of fertility, health and migration: 178th, very close to the bottom.37 Finally, in the World Bank rating of political stability, Russia ranked 147th in 2020, between Belarus and Papua New Guinea.38 More recent estimates are not available, but my guess is that they would be off the chart.
How was it possible that the well-educated people of this rich country were so poor and unfree? Where did Russian money come from and where did it vanish to? Why did such an enormous country with a long history and famous technological advances make its people so unhappy and unhealthy? The answer is simple: the Russian state. It was huge, archaic and very expensive (see Chapter 3). Moreover, it did not rely on the people but was wholly dependent on the exploitation of natural resources, and mostly one type of them: fossil fuels. Competing with the United States and Saudi Arabia, Russia belonged to the troika that led the world in oil extraction.