Russia was also the biggest exporter of natural gas worldwide, and the sixth largest producer of coal, after China and others. If one summed up all these carbon calories, Russia would top the world rankings. But while the US and China consumed the majority of their fossil fuels domestically, Russia was the world's leading exporter of energy. Taking into account wherever its fossil fuels were delivered and burned, Russia was responsible for more emissions than any other country in the world except the US.39 As a result, by selling as much oil and gas as Saudi Arabia and Qatar combined, Russia was a very rich country indeed.
Russia's military expenditure between 2000 and 2020 exceeded a trillion dollars.40 This was an enormous sum of money, but it represented a minor portion of Russia's oil and gas profits. Taken together, the country's military, security and law-enforcement costs were equal to a third of federal expenditure; in addition, one fifth of the budget remained secret, which was unparalleled in modern economies.41 During these two decades, Russia's military budget increased by a factor of seven, compared to a factor of two in Germany and 2.5 in the United States. At the start of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia spent about one billion dollars a day on its war effort, depleting its annual military budget within a couple of months. The Russian economy was half the size of Germany's, despite the fact that its population was almost twice as big; but Russia's military budget was much higher than Germany's. With a population smaller than Brazil's, Russia had a much larger standing army. Though it had a GDP inferior to that of the US by a factor of seven, Russia nevertheless competed with the US for military predominance. Early twenty-first-century Russia was the most unequal, the most militarized and the most carbonized among the big countries of the world. Under Putin's rule, it became the most unpredictable of them all.
Saving money on social spending - health care, education, pensions and urban development - the Russian rulers cultivated a mutual understanding with right-wing Republicans in the US, who were also dependent on oil money. In fact, however, Putin's overblown and aggressive state was the exact opposite of the Tea Party ideal. As a ruler, Putin was much closer to the pompous and erratic King George III than to the Boston protesters who threw tea chests into the sea. From King George to Putin, mercantilist dictators wished to see their treasuries enriched and their subjects impoverished.
For classical economics, it was the labor of citizens that constituted the source of a country's wealth. This idea was at the core of the labor theory of value, developed by Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and it continues to feature in contemporary economics textbooks. It was not true, however, that labor alone produced value. Imperial states such as England and Belgium derived enormous wealth and power from the natural resources they shipped from colonies both near and distant.42 But even in this imperial context, Russia was an anomaly. There, a combination of neomercantilism, internal colonization, libertarian taxes and uncontrolled corruption created one of the most unequal, top-heavy societies in history (see Chapter 4).
During three long post-Soviet decades, Russia had an excellent chance to reshape itself into a peaceful, law-abiding and hard-working country. But its massive security apparatus and corrupt, irrational bureaucracy mopped up the wealth produced from holes in the earth rather than by the work of the people. This greedy "elite" drew almost all of its lifeblood from the sale of fossil fuels, rendering the population redundant for its purposes. Sometimes, however, and particularly in times of crisis, this large and needy population became a nuisance, and potentially a danger. The crowds of protestors who took to the streets of Moscow in 2012 were as threatening to Putin and his regime as the Ukrainian troops of 2022, though the latter were much more deadly, albeit more distant.
The Russian attack on Ukraine was one battle in the larger war of the Anthropocene. Any war is a mega-polluter, and there should be no war in the age of climate crisis. Russian tanks and missiles were bringing an end not only to human lives but, potentially, to human life itself.
Petrostate
Historically, the concepts of climate change and the petrostate developed in parallel but independently of one another. Both were introduced in the early 1980s. While the climate crisis has been acknowledged as a global issue and a common destiny, the petrostate has been understood as the local problem of a few distant countries, all of them rogue but also indispensable for the global economy. The best study of the petrostate is that of the Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil, in his 1997 book The Magical State.1 A little later, the South American world gave us another helpful concept, extractivismo.2 Political scientists preferred the notion of "oil curse," but they applied it exclusively to the Third World. For the carbon-dependent countries of the First World, there was the concept of "Dutch disease," which was favored by economists. Despite semantic differences, all these nation-specific concepts reflected a larger malaise that was destroying the whole human world. At this global level, the problem is called the Anthropocene. Extracted from the depths of the earth, oil first pollutes the immediate environment, then corrupts the polity it enriches, and finally poisons the Earth's atmosphere. As I wrote in another book, we will never run out of oil because we will run out of air first.3
Extraction vs. production
Russia's booms and busts followed the inflows and outflows of petrodollars and gas-euros. This was not unique, but rather exemplary. Due to its geographic scale and military might, Russia amplified the typical problems of many oil-extracting states, from Venezuela to Saudi Arabia. But the oil curse played a particularly vicious role in Russia precisely because it had a large and educated population.
Only l percent of the Russian population worked in. the fossil fuel extraction and transportation industry, and a much smaller group benefited from it. However, this trade accounted for more than half of Russia's state budget. This disproportion between labor and value was definitive for petrostates. In the age of oil, there were countries like Qatar, economic powerhouses whose small populations were complemented by imported and unprotected labor. Their masters were as rich as sultans, which some of them were. There were countries like the US, which also traded fossil fuels and polluted the planet, but whose extracted energy was mostly used domestically. There were also countries like Norway, which sold its oil but did not spend the profits, polluting the planet but refusing to corrupt itself. And finally, there were populous petrostates such as Russia, Venezuela and Iran.
For these petrostates, oil and gas played the role of the almighty resources featured in twenty-first-century movies - unobtainium in Avatar, spice in Dune, or even the ring in The Lord of the Rings. Based on fictions created in paleomodernity, these films mocked that era's archaic resource-dependency for the young gaiamodern public. The obsession with oil was typical of the Western consumer. Petrostates were addicted not so much to oil as to money. Relying on their single-product export, they saw it as the all-powerful solution to their multiple problems. It was export - with all its connected issues of transportation, financialization and securitization - rather than extraction that defined the petrostate. OPEC, the worldwide cartel of petrostates, meant an organization of petroleum exporting countries; an organization of petroleum extracting countries would have been a very different mix.