Nature's Evil

Oil business traditions and security requirements create that extreme gender inequality which many observers of Russia notice there. To reflect the economic, gender and psychological traits of this human type, I call him petromacho . These men – the roughly 7 per cent of the population who extract, transport and protect oil and gas – secure more than half of the Russian Federation’s budget. Two classes of citizen emerge – the privileged all-male minority which extracts, protects and trades a valuable resource and all the rest who depend on the redistribution of income from this trade. In its ideal form, such a country would turn into a gas and oil corporation, which bears responsibility only for the trade of fossil fuel. However, the presence of a population complicates this scheme. For a state living off the export of oil, its own population is superfluous to its purposes. But two-thirds of the gas and a quarter of the oil extracted in Russia are used for domestic consumption; diverting a valuable resource from the foreign market, this is a burden that the government is trying to reduce. The fact that the population is superfluous doesn’t mean that people must suffer or die. The state will take care of them but only in a way that suits the government. Instead of being a source of national wealth, the population turns into an object of state charity.

Addictive monopolies lead to inequality. Sustaining these levels of inequality is more difficult for petrostates with a large population, such as Russia, Nigeria, Indonesia, Venezuela and, until recently, Mexico. Again, Russia is typical: according to the statistics for 2018, the 1 per cent of the population who are employed in oil and gas extraction provided about half of the state budget, though the actual numbers are even higher. Income from oil is enormous, but it is not enough for the twin tasks of meeting the demands of the elite and supporting the population. The aim of authoritarian regimes is to balance these tasks, which is easy during a time of growth and difficult in a slump. Dependency on oil is often compared with addiction, making an analogy between a sluggish economy which causes millions to suffer and an individual pathology. In 2006, President George W. Bush said: ‘America is addicted to oil.’ In Russia, critics talk of the ‘oil needle’ on which the country is mainlining. The governments of post-Soviet Russia have repeatedly announced programmes for diversification and modernisation. But this large country with weak democratic traditions has found it impossible to self-medicate.

In the petrostate, men and women depend not on their labour but on the charity dispensed by the elite. Both sides rely on external forces, and they bargain not among themselves but with someone else. God, nature, chance, or some other power arranged things so that oil is connected with religion. The Islamic countries own 62 per cent of the world’s oil reserves and export more than half of global oil. Another 5 per cent of reserves belong to countries with an Orthodox Christian population. 26 There is also a link with ideology: a quarter of extracted oil is concentrated in three post-socialist countries – Russia, Venezuela and Kazakhstan. Only a religious or nationalist language can explain the fateful chance that endowed some countries with an abundance of resources and gave none at all to others. Unable to understand the source of their blessing but feeling that they are exceptional, the oil-rich elites have reworked the ideology of the chosen people, combining mysticism and nationalism, arrogance and cupidity. Resource nationalism helps an elite to distinguish between its own people who receive the state’s charity and aliens who must not receive it. For the elite, their charity confirms their self-awareness as chosen people. For the population, it turns citizens into paupers and migrants into nonentities. This is a vicious circle of evil.

The oil standard