Alexander Etkind | Education Training Society

Very good insight into and overview of Putin’s Russia and the ‘west’ including the Anglosphere from Alexander Etkin (presently of CEU Wien).

Following are significant excerpts from Etkind’s analysis from reviewer at Inside Story (Australia) Jon Richardson, on how it endeavours to explain Russia, and one would add many other nations too, mirroring the radical right or corrupt nativist authoritarians with support from fossil fuels & industry oligarchs, consolidated right wing media, think tanks and leveraging ageing electorates.

A link of interest is in Hungary Central Europe where a few entities promote Christian nationalist conservatism, namely The Centre for Fundamental Rights (linked to US CPAC), MCC Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the Danubius Institute (linked to the Koch Network Heritage Foundation). Further former Murdoch – Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson would promote both Hungary and Putin’s Russia (vs. Ukraine), with dog whistling of Soros via the anti-semitic ‘great replacement’, anti-refugee and anti-immigration sentiment supported by Tanton Network, with a veritable ‘conga line’ of Anglo conservatives presenting in Hungary, in support.

If one goes back in history with the Anglosphere, much was and is still shared with Russia’s regime and its former empire, including related to the British (& German) royal families, shared conservatism, religious orthodoxy, far right nativism or nationalism, authoritarianism, class order, fossil fuels and oligarchy.

If one then looks at the values, interests and talking points of major Anglo media outlets, think tanks in Koch Network, unspoken but dog whistled class order and eugenics of Tanton Network, are there similarities that make allegations of Russian influence on Brexit and Trump, seem unsurprising?

Using sociocultural issues to deflect and divide electorates for right wing power, e.g. modern immigration, authoritarianism to negate any dissent, then use Orwellian doublespeak for ageing voters to deny freedoms for younger generations, but how does this relate Russia and the Anglosphere apart from these obvious generic traits?

Climate science denial, anti-EU for Brexit to avoid constraints e.g. financial transparency, anti-money laundering measures, workers’ rights & unions, work health & safety, open society and empowered citizens. Central has been the US fossil fueled ‘libertarian’ Koch Network think tanks in US, UK and Australia, with media architecture helped by Rupert Murdoch while still unresolved, but Russian money and influence in UK politics, especially the Conservative party.

Finally the use of events or grifters to inversely present pro-Russian narratives by blaming Ukraine, NATO, the EU and the west for provoking Russia through visitors platformed in Hungary. The highest profile ‘geopolitical experts’ visiting and demanding ‘peace’ included Jeffrey Sachs linked to (originally) fossil fueled Rockefeller Foundation (Standard Oil/Exxon & UN ‘Sustainability’) and John Mearsheimer with the Charles Koch Foundation.

Another important area of shared interests, often presented alongside ‘peace’ and anti-EU platforms, is conservative Christianity, especially the US environment via the Council on National Policy which is described as ‘owned’, like the GOP, by Koch Network donors or investors; over years since Soviet times there have been links whether WCC, WCG or more recently ADF, while energising evangelicals, pro-life, Baptists and Catholics.

Who is manipulating whom?

From Inside Story:

‘Russia’s war with the future

Underlying Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are existential fears of democracy, diversity, sustainability and the decline of patriarchy

What links Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutinous March on Moscow, climate denialism, the Nord Stream pipeline and vaccine scepticism with the jailing of Aleksei Navalny, the Russian Orthodox patriarch’s rants against “gay parades,” domestic violence and declining life expectancy in Russia?

In his provocative new book, Russia Against Modernity, Alexander Etkind argues that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is part of a single, broad historical pattern. It is the last gasp of a failing, kleptocratic petrostate for which external aggression is a natural move. Rather than the Ukraine war itself, Etkind is interested in the conditions within Russia that have culminated so calamitously.

In what is more a pamphlet than a treatise, Etkind combines brevity and playfulness with a degree of erudition that other works covering the Russia–Ukraine conflict seldom manage, melding political economy, history, demography, social theory and social psychology. That range reflects Etkind’s eclectic polymathy: a native of St Petersburg (then Leningrad), he grew up in the Soviet Union, completed two degrees in psychology at Leningrad State University before earning a PhD in Slavonic cultural history in Helsinki, and has variously taught and researched — in faculties of sociology, political science, languages, history and international relations — in St Petersburg, New York, Cambridge, Florence and Vienna…

….Most explanations of the Ukraine war tend to give primacy to either external or internal factors. The “externalists,” for want of a better word, include those who claim the war is a natural outcome of unwise/reckless NATO expansion. Going further, some even buy the Kremlin line — despite all evidence to the contrary — that the West’s fundamental, if unstated, goal is to weaken or destroy Russia.

At the other end of the externalist spectrum are those, including many Ukrainians and East Europeans, who believe an inherent imperialism is demonstrated by Russia’s aggression towards former territories. Some attribute this to the size of the country, its innate political culture, the “Russian psyche” or, in its crudest renderings, a kind of Russian DNA.

“Internalists” emphasise the domestic drivers of the war — notably an authoritarian state’s need to legitimise itself through nationalist and revanchist propaganda. In this view, the Ukraine war and other militaristic posturing or adventures are cynically deployed to further the interests of the elite. For some, Ukraine presented a threat to the Kremlin because it offered a democratic alternative. A handful on the left claim that the war’s roots lie in the ambitions of Russian oligarchs vying to capture Ukraine’s valuable natural and other resources.…

….Etkind’s main idea is that the Russian state and society is an exemplar of “paleomodernity,” following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union in championing “grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature.” For Etkind, Putin’s war is not only a “special operation” against the Ukrainian people, their statehood and culture; it is also “a broader operation against the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor.”

If paleo modernity — a conglomeration of steel, oil and gunpowder — reached its apotheosis in the twentieth century, then its twenty-first-century antithesis is “gaia modernity,” a higher form of civilisation where small, sustainable, democratic and feminine are beautiful, and racial, sexual and intellectual diversity are cherished. Etkind seems to see this nightmarish scenario for Tucker Carlson or Sky After Dark’s pundits as both a utopia to be dreamed of and a kind of immanent social order, destined to emerge, echoing Hegel’s and Marx’s systems of thought.

Etkind’s key take is that the “oiligarchs” and bureaucrats running Russia saw this “advance of history” as an existential threat to its oil and gas exports, which make up a third of Russia’s GDP, two-thirds of its exports and half the state budget. The money was crucial to the stability of Russia’s currency, crucial for its military spending and crucial for maintaining the elite’s luxurious lifestyle. It was also the chief driver of corruption, inequality and declining social and demographic indicators. All of this fed popular disillusionment, growing authoritarianism and elite paranoia and the ideologies supporting aggression.

As an archetypal petrostate, Etkind argues, Russia is afflicted by the resource curse, whereby an economy as a whole underperforms because a single commodity is so dominant. Initially, in the 2000s, rising oil prices underpinned Putin’s success in restoring economic growth. The populace gained a welcome sense of stability after the economic and political turmoil of the “wild nineties,” leading many to accept the gradual erosion of civil liberties.

By the 2010s, however, not only were Russian incomes falling but so were a range of social and economic metrics. By 2021, life expectancy had fallen to 105th globally, per-capita health spending to 104th and education spending to 125th. Russia had the fourth-highest carbon emissions globally and among the highest rates of suicides, abortions, road deaths and industrial accidents.

Thanks largely to embezzlement, post-Soviet Russia witnessed the fastest rise in inequality ever recorded. Its income inequality was among the world’s highest and by 2021 it led all major countries in inequality of wealth: 58 per cent of national wealth belonging to the top 1 per cent, well above Brazil (49 per cent) and the United States (35 per cent). More than a fifth of Russia’s citizens, meanwhile, lived on less than US$10 a day, and the middle class had been hollowed out.

In excess of three trillion dollars had been stolen and squirrelled away abroad — more than the total financial assets legally owned by Russian households. “Economists from Harvard and Moscow alike believed that economic growth would be the source of all good in Russia, that accumulated wealth would trickle down to the poor, that the rising tide would lift all boats,” writes Etkind. “In fact, it lifted only the yachts of the rich. The boats of the poor leaked, and they drowned in the tide.”….

….Some of Etkind’s most interesting, albeit speculative, chapters deal with the interplay between Russia’s political economy, its demographic decline and issues like gender inequality and homophobia. The latter have become a common theme of state-sponsored propaganda: TV pundits talk about fighting a degenerate West where genders proliferate; patriarchs and priests equate the war on Ukraine with fighting those Satanic “gay parades.”

Partly because of very high divorce rates, children are raised by only one parent, usually the mother, in one in three Russian families. Etkind pushes the envelope when he posits the growth of “fatherlessness” as a cause of authoritarian tendencies, as some postwar German theorists did in the case of Nazi Germany. High rates of domestic violence — which was actually decriminalised in 2017 in a nod to patriarchal opinion — have been another symptom of social dysfunction.

Etkind also highlights “granny power” as another bulwark against modernity: the heightened role of babushki (grandmothers) in many three-generation households, he says, imbues children with backward-looking and authoritarian ideas and attitudes. The three-generation household, with overburdened mothers and absent fathers, is a product of the inadequate incomes, housing, childcare and pensions generated by the parasitic petrostate, as well as men’s much lower life expectancy (sixty-five years, compared with women’s seventy-seven).

Etkind points to other elements of Russia’s demographic catastrophe — world-leading abortion rates, high rates of emigration among the young and educated — as signs of lack of trust and faith in a future governed by a corrupt and authoritarian state. “The birth rate,” he writes, “was the ultimate manifestation of public opinion.” A lot of these demographic problems were also present in the Soviet years, serving as a kind of canary in the mine presaging the Soviet Union’s decline.

….Etkind coins the term “stop modernism” to describe Russia’s “special operation” against gaia modernity. The war in Ukraine is just one weapon in its arsenal, alongside climate denial, election interference and others. Decarbonisation represents a huge challenge to Russia’s interests, and although Putin’s regime has played along at times with moves towards curbing emissions, it has also played a spoiler role. The biggest “gaia modern” threat to the wealth of Russia’s elite have been the moves towards zero emissions by the European Union, its chief market for gas and oil, including the Transborder Carbon Tax announced in 2021.

Etkind also suggests that the 2009 Climategate hacks of emails, which purported to show climate change to be a conspiracy among scientists, was of a piece with Russia’s more recent hacking and online-disinformation efforts (including via Prigozhin’s infamous troll factories) to support right-wing politicians in the United States and Europe….

….Russia Against Modernity ends with a picture of the future: Russia will inevitably lose the war and begin a process of defederation. Its constituent national minorities, indigenous peoples and diverse regions will at last — after a long but hopefully not bloody transition period — gain real autonomy and democracy and move towards a gaia modern world, leaving behind the petrostate that has exploited them. One can’t help feeling that this is more utopian dream than sober analysis, however much we might hope elements of it come true.

Sceptics may ask whether Russia is really so different from some or many developed capitalist societies in terms of the evils and dysfunctions Etkind outlines. I suspect he would say that they/we all cling to elements of paleo modernity to differing degrees, exemplified in different political and social forces competing with the gaia modern. He would add that, as a petrostate, Russia is a more extreme and different kind of polity in terms of its interest in thwarting gaia modernity.

Russia Against Modernity is a useful corrective for some on the left (and far right) who are instinctively suspicious of American actions and see merit in claims that Ukraine is a “proxy war” by NATO against Russia. Systemic factors in Russia are more than enough to explain the war, without having to disentangle the history of NATO enlargement or the contribution of Western blundering in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. As I have argued elsewhere, while we can debate the wisdom or morality of these actions, none represented a serious threat to Russia. And Etkind is right to see Ukraine’s treatment of Russian speakers and other internal issues as more of a “fetish” among the Russian elite, as he puts it, rather than a serious factor.

Etkind’s work is also valuable because he is a Russian with an intimate understanding of the country and broad international experience who brings to bear serious intellectual firepower. In one section, “The Unbearable Lightness of Western Pundits,” he beautifully skewers so-called experts like Niall Ferguson and Adam Tooze who pointed to Ukrainian weaknesses and the inevitability of Russian victory just before the 2022 invasion. Another target is international relations guru John Mearsheimer, who more or less justified the invasion by saying that, if Ukraine joined NATO, Russia would suffer “existentially.” Russia now has both Sweden and Finland rushing to join NATO, while Ukraine, of course, had no near-term prospect of membership.

One thing common to these generalist historians, economists and foreign policy wonks is a lack of real expertise in Russian or Ukrainian history and politics. That’s why it is vital to listen to independent Russian (and Ukrainian!) voices on the war, as well as real Western specialists. Only a few of the latter make excuses for Putin’s regime and many would see merit in the broad thrust of Etkind’s argument.

Likewise, the Russian democratic opposition almost unanimously sees the war as generated by systemic internal problems. They would agree with Aleksei Navalny, whom Etkind lauds as the champion of exposing corruption, in blaming the war on Russia’s “endless cycle of imperial authoritarianism.”

Russia Against Modernity

By Alexander Etkind | Polity Press’