Petromacho, or Mechanisms of De-Modernization in a Resource State

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Notes

¹. D.C. North, J.J. Wallis, and B.R. Weingast, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

². Grigory Yavlinksy gave de-modernization a similar meaning, see G. Yavlinksy, Demodernizatsiia. Sovremennaia Rossiia, ekonomicheskie otsenki i politicheskie vyvody (De-modernization. Modern Russia, Economic Evaluations and Political Conclusions) (Moscow: Epitsentr, 2003); Vladimir Ryzhkov also used this concept (www.newspb.ru/allnews/370849/). This concept is also used in a similar sense by the demographer Andrei Podlazov (http://nonlin.ru/node/462) and the historian Andrei Portnov (http://net.abimperio.net/node/18270). Kirill Rodov recently wrote about counter-modernism as Putin’s personal project: www.novayagazeta.ru/politics/3811.html.

³. In his novel, Dmitry Bykov wavers between two possible concepts of phlogiston: as an alternative resource such as shale gas (the production of which required many creative inventions which are as yet unknown in Russia) or a completely new and unknown source of energy, such as an energy Internet. On this and other aspects of the novel ZHD, see M. Lipovetsky and A. Etkind, “Vozvrashchenie tritona: sovetskaia katastrofa i postsovetskii roman” (The Return of Triton: Soviet Catastrophe and the Post-Soviet Novel), Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008, no. 94.

⁴. See I. Kalinin, “Nostalgic Modernization: The Soviet Past as a ‘Historical Horizon,’” Slavonica, 2011, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 156–167; I. Kalinin, “Boi za istoriiu: proshloe kak ogranichennii resurs” (Battles for History: The Past as a Limited Resource), Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 2011, no. 4 (78), pp. 330–339.

⁵. Quoted in http://himmelfarb.livejournal.com/322431.html.

⁶. K. Polanyi, Velikaia transformatsiia. Politicheskie i ekonomicheskie istoki nashego vremeni (The Great Transformation. Political and Economic Sources of Our Time) (Moscow, 2002).

⁷. Ch. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990).

⁸. A. Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), ch. 5.

⁹. T. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London and New York: Verso, 2011).

¹⁰. D. Acemoglu and J.A. Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); idem, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (London: Profile, 2012).

¹¹. On the paradoxical link between constructions of the “Soviet past as cultural heritage” and the “Soviet past as a resource of modernization see Kalinin, “Nostalgic Modernization.”

¹². M.L. Ross, The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).