— You have done a lot of research on Russian society, particularly on the interweaving of neoliberal and neoconservative tendencies in governing the population. Your recent publications develop these themes even more decisively. What has changed after February 24, 2022?

— Over the past two decades, the neoliberal component of Russian public policy has often been overlooked. Regime apologists invested in the statist worldview denied its existence, attributing exclusively Western origins to neoliberalism. Liberal critics of the regime devoted almost all their attention to authoritarian trends. As a result, radical shifts in the structure of the labor market, the cultural market and the management of public goods remained virtually unnoticed.

The more Vladimir Putin tightens the grip of his usurpation of power and the more his dictatorial tendencies consolidate, many people will start to think that the style of Russian governance is defined exclusively by authoritarianism. Meanwhile, both the neoliberal institutions founded back in the 1990s and the neoliberal rationality that reigned in the Russian economy and culture in the pre-war period have not disappeared. Previously, neoconservatism served the neoliberal population management. After the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine it has turned upside down: it is neoliberal expertise that now serves the authoritarian rule. This is the most important change inaugurated by the war. It is evidenced by shifts in the organization of management that affect a variety of spheres, not just politics. For example, within the framework of the “quiet” military mobilization that continues in Russia, control over the military duties of hired workers is assigned to the heads of enterprises. They are obliged to check that their subordinates have a military ID under the threat of economic sanctions.

— You can also mention the lists of those who receive exemptions from the military mobilization. Both carrot and stick at the same time?

— Here it is easy to see the shadow of the stick held by the government over all workers and employers, and to interpret what is seen exclusively in an authoritarian manner. However, the instrument of coercion itself is not authoritarian, since it does not imply (at least at the moment) criminal punishment of entrepreneurs or the dismissal of “ineffective” managers of state-owned enterprises for failure to comply with instructions. That is, in this model there are no direct bureaucratic, command sanctions. It is built on economic, albeit negative, motivation—on fines. This model uses one of the main mechanics of neoliberal governance: the voluntary and interested implementation of government regulations by the population. Among other things, this means that punitive squads with black chevrons do not walk around enterprises. The government authorizes the entrepreneurs themselves to transfer part of their productive force to the needs of the front.

“After the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine it has turned upside down: it is neoliberal expertise that now serves the authoritarian rule”

Enterprises manage the balance of mobilized and non-mobilized, sometimes resorting to sophisticated games. For example, after the September 2022 mobilization was announced, some enterprise managers wanted to retain the most qualified workers, especially if they required a lot of time to train. To do this, the leaders hired additional personnel, which they immediately got rid of, transferring them to the military registration and enlistment offices. This is a fully neoliberal model, only put into action during times of war and in the context of state violence. It is this mode, and not the brutal authoritarian coercion, that today sets the balance between efficiency and thanatopolitics, sentencing entire groups of the population to death.

— But yesterday’s migrants, who recently received Russian citizenship, are now being taken to military registration and enlistment offices, and even in police buses. The brutal mechanism of mobilization acts against those who cannot defend themselves. It is still impossible to imagine that employees of any metropolitan office would be detained like this.

— Office workers were taken from their workplaces, military commissars even came to pick them up in restaurants, and this really was at odds with neoliberal management techniques. It is clear that it is precisely such lightning-fast raids that primarily become the subject of media and collective attention, and not the routine of slow and quiet mobilization, which is entrusted to the employers themselves. The fact is that the operators of the undeclared martial law are two wings of the state bureaucracy: the civil one, which continues to use neoliberal management techniques, and the coercive one, which inherits the bureaucratic structure of power. This structure easily fits into the authoritarian model. However, it also has a hidden dimension, which is due to the almost frank recognition of the ineffectiveness of the authoritarian-bureaucratic model. Remember the story of the centralized digitization of lists of those called up by military registration and enlistment offices: it was never completed. Thus, the authoritarian order demonstrated its dependence on the technology market.

Another example of an inherently neoliberal rationality is the 2023 leaks from government communications. From the document that fell into the hands of journalists, it follows that the current “quiet” mobilization, which avoids the autocratic gesture of universal and indiscriminate sending to the front, presupposes a strict social division of the population. Those whom authorities classify as “socially useless” or “less effective” are the primary candidates for mobilization. What kind of people are these? These are the unemployed, who have recently suffered bankruptcy, who have been registered with social welfare authorities for a long time, and who have large debts. These are also labor migrants who have recently received Russian citizenship. Previously, the object of neoliberal management was primarily the producing and competitive, that is, the “effective” part of the population. Under war conditions, the categories of “useless,” “ineffective,” and “non-productive” came to the forefront of management. The government is trying to fill the manpower shortage at the front by turning the “useless” population into a deadly “effective” one.

This illustrates the important shift I already mentioned. Against the backdrop of the war, the governance model turned from neoliberal to neomercantilist. Now it prioritizes resources that are associated with state sovereignty: population size and density, military security and economic self-sufficiency of the territory. The latter, on the one hand, presupposes import substitution and the country’s achievement of commodity autarky, and on the other, the growth of export growth.

Since February 24, 2022, despite all the sanctions, the trade balance has increased significantly compared to the pre-war years. This effect brings to mind the neomercantilist policies of colonial powers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as England or France. I mean not only the sovereignization of the economy through import substitution, but also the colonial replenishment of reserves through annexed territories, including the replenishment of the “reserves” of the population. It is in this light that the removal of residents from Ukrainian territories should be viewed.

— You mean the removal of Ukrainian children into Russia?

— Yes, the removal of both children and adults, which has been ongoing since 2014. Children are “Russified” both in refugee camps and through special programs in secondary schools. Adults are not only forcibly deported, but also lured with options of benefits and resettlement on Russian territory. This import of population is a reassertion of the mercantilist rationality that dominated the colonial European powers of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. At that time, this rationality acquired distinct militaristic features.

“Against the backdrop of the war, the governance model turned from neoliberal to neomercantilist”

Sporadic outbursts of mercantilism could also be observed relatively recently in the demographic policies of Western European countries. Thus, in the 1960–80s, two thousand children were transported from the former French colony, from Reunion Island. They were taken from their families and resettled with families in the French region of Creuse, which had extremely low population density and birth rates. In absolute terms, this episode looks much less dramatic than the deportation of twenty thousand Ukrainian children to Russia. However, behind both lies the same rationality: the demographic “strengthening” of an empty national territory. In the Russian case, this extreme should be considered in the context of a much more widespread policy that pursues three goals simultaneously: to keep Russian youth in emptying regions, to ensure maximum employment, and to get rid of the remnants (or even “surpluses”) of the unproductive population.

In this regard, Prigozhin’s recruitment scheme at the Wagner PMC is indicative. At the beginning of the war, Ukrainian prisons declared an amnesty for prisoners who were ready to voluntarily go to the front. Russian propagandists then made an incredible noise: look, no one “there” wants to go to war, they’re counting on criminals! When Prigozhin adopted this scheme, his media initially denied this cynical contract: paying for freedom at the cost of life in a campaign of conquest. The secrecy surrounding the terms of this contract was dictated not only by the violation of the rule of law, yet another blow to the reputation of the Russian government. Prigozhin’s scheme destroyed the previous rationality of government: neglecting the laws of peacetime, the “Kremlin chef” commercialized the emergency demands of wartime. Later, this practice of “disposal” of the unproductive population was picked up by a government agency, the Ministry of Defense. That is, having disappeared from the stage, the orchestra conductor left his recipes and instruments in the government’s arsenal. Prigozhin’s scheme, and the very design of his stage character, revealed a previously unobvious circumstance. Namely: over the last decade, under the Russian government, a new layer of operators of state resources has emerged. These people are no longer oligarchs, but tax farmers. The oligarchs of the Yeltsin period, who remained under Putin, are private owners of large fortunes who invest in the state machine, receiving higher, risk-protected profits. Tax farmers act in exactly the opposite way: they perform government functions on a private contract. That is, they rarely act as owners of the funds that they manage, although, by buying out the functions of the state and performing them instead of the government, they profit handsomely from this business.

The very figure of the general tax farmer moves us to the mercantilist and colonial age of the European monarchies. These are large-scale, self-interested actors: the owners of collection agencies acting as tax collectors, speculators managing food supplies, money lenders playing the role of customs officers. They collected a financial harvest from the population, part of which they returned to the court in the form of taxes and personal allowances for the nobility, and, if necessary, they loaned money to the government, receiving new payoffs in return. The condition for the continuation of the work of their enterprises was and is again today a high degree of loyalty to the state nobility. It is dictated by the amount of resources transferred to them, including through the shadow channels.

When the contours of Prigozhin’s economic archipelago emerged in the public sphere, it became obvious that this was a type of entrepreneur close to tax farmers, “new” in comparison with Yeltsin’s oligarchs. Moreover, Putin admitted that the Wagner PMC is not Prigozhin’s private enterprise, but a shadow project of the state fully funded by the government. Probably, other enterprises of figures close to Putin, sitting atop of other public–private partnerships, have acquired similar features today: both the diversified business empire of the Kovalchuks and the media empire of Gabrelyanov. In comparison with the previous oligarchs, these are no longer independent players who joined Putin’s alliance, but rather managers of the state capital that was transferred from a public fund to private farming.

“Tax farmers act in exactly the opposite way: they perform government functions on a private contract”

These figures and schemes are brought closer to the mercantilist era by another intriguing matter. It manifests itself more clearly than others in Prigozhin’s African projects, where it literally shines. We’re talking about gold. The same gold that enterprises registered to Prigozhin mined through legal and illegal means in Sudan and Congo. Then it was loaded onto planes under the guise of food and colonial goods and taken out to the Russian Federation, thereby illegally replenishing the gold reserves in the basements of the Central Bank.

Gold is one of the fetishes of the mercantilist era. It was a passive reserve that ensured the stability of the national currency and was associated with sovereign power. It is also a chimerical standard, an illusion of autarky and wealth, which acts as both a physical, or financial, and symbolic expression of sovereignty. In the mercantilist era, in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the more gold a particular treasury had at its disposal, the more weight and power the monarchy acquired in the international arena.

The absence of sections on mercantilism in modern history and social science textbooks, inheriting the Soviet canon, enhances the effect of invisibility of radical shifts in economics and administration, with which I began the conversation. It is difficult for everyone to accept the fact that preparations for a “sudden” war for us have been going on since the end of the 2000s, and not only and not primarily in the army. As if in a prolonged attack of persecution mania, the government feverishly accumulated gold reserves, got rid of external debt, and a little later, from the end of the 2010s, restored the security apparatus, army and police, dried up by previous reforms. In the shadow of partnerships between the state and the private sector, PMCs were formed, the existence of which we learned almost a decade later. All this remained unrecognized; there were no suitable concepts and clear indicators for the radical shifts taking place. The public sphere was drowning in the endless drawn-out commentary by political experts and journalists about the “hybrid regime,” whether authoritarian democracy or democratic authoritarianism, while these comments inevitably stumbled over questions of the representative mandate and the origins of mass popular support for the regime.

Against this background, analysis using the vocabulary of critical political economy has often provoked an allergic reaction among authoritative commentators. This is how large-scale neoliberal reforms of Russian governance institutions went unnoticed by the vast majority of experts and observers. This blindness is even more obvious in relation to the neo-mercantilist turn. Meanwhile, by the beginning of the 2020s, some neoliberal institutions had already mutated or were even directly replaced by mercantilist structures. The principle of efficiency gave way to the principle of sovereignty. This led to the creation of a vast network of management of sovereign resources, not only economic, but also cultural, where neoliberal techniques were subordinated to mercantilist goals. Public–private structures, such as, for example, Medinsky’s Russian Military History Society and programs of the Ministry of Education aimed at patriotic education became its nodes. They did not at all discard the criteria of productivity: on the contrary, profitability and efficiency were declared to be their basis. At the same time, both of them received significant financial support, accompanying the accumulation of passive sovereign funds in the economy and offering their ideological justification.

By 2020, gold reserves seem to have reached a critical level, sufficient to sovereignize the national currency. The Mir payment system, focused on the national territory, steadily ensured financial transactions. The predominance of exports over imports grew. At the same time as the economy, the sovereignization of the public sphere took place. Repressions against NGOs and the media were accompanied by an increasing burden of patriotic education in schools and universities. That is, performance management remained a management tactic, while the sovereignty of power became a strategy. In 2022, Vladimir Putin carried out the next logical step: an undeclared coup d’etat. This coup consisted of the fact that on February 22, 2022, the president publicly broke ties with the bureaucratic and collegial management structure within the walls of the Kremlin itself.

By announcing the start of the war to ministers on the same day as to the entire country, Putin outlined his new position, that of a military prince, a usurper of state power. As a result, the entire state machinery was reoriented towards new tasks, already formulated within the framework of neo-mercantilist rationality. This includes the conquest of new territories, the forced supply of population to zones of high demographic decline, and the placement of insufficiently efficient Russian industry on a sovereign military footing.

— If we are now at the beginning of a neomercantilist phase, what are the likely future scenarios?

— Strictly speaking, we are no longer at the beginning, but in a phase of rapid growth of the neomercantilist trend. It is important to take into account that neoliberal tendencies also persist in Russian governance, which operate not only in the production management apparatus. They persist simultaneously in the educational sector, with its obsession with “effective contracts,” and they also affect, for example, trade. Thus, the shadow export of oil, gas, and other resources, which historically provide Russia (and previously the USSR) with the main export revenue at least since the late 1970s, operates within the framework of a free trade system.

“In 2022, Vladimir Putin carried out the next logical step: an undeclared coup d’etat”

Here, perhaps, we need to take a step back and recall that the system of free exchange in post-war Europe since the late 1940s was constructed as a direct antithesis to the mercantilist remnants of the governance that led the world to the great war. One of the key instruments of the post-war world was the joint Franco-German management of coal and steel in the Ruhr region, the main strategic resource of the Second World War. This was one of the first agreements from which a new, united Europe began.

The joint statement of the American president and the British prime minister in 1957 on the role of free exchange in the postwar order closely linked it to the idea of ​​civil peace. Even earlier, already at the end of the 1940s, the same goal was pursued by agreements on the free circulation of wage labor in Europe and the removal of intra-European customs barriers, as well as plans to introduce a single European currency. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was created as a financial body operating across national borders. These and other measures were in one way or another aimed at introducing, establishing, and even imposing a model of free exchange, which was directly opposed to mercantilist policies and was designed to prevent a future war. That is, the supranational compulsion to free exchange was not subject to the desire of financial lobbies to merely increase the capitalization of European markets, as might have happened in peacetime. In the post-war order, such compulsion served as an insurance policy against the fatal consequences of mercantilism.

Although mercantilism is on the rise, the global economy is still dominated by liberal and neoliberal models. They assume the same free circulation of capital, labor, and if possible, the removal of customs and visa restrictions for the most profitable resources, including their producers. Ultimately, this model is reproduced in a routine rhythm, both in Russia and abroad. Thus, despite a sharp mercantilist turn and persistent anti-Western rhetoric, the Russian government has still not introduced exit visas (their abolition once became an integral condition for the free circulation of labor in post-war Europe). Large transfers of capital across Russian borders are still possible and encouraged. Today it is very problematic for individuals to transfer money to support relatives who have gone abroad, but for large clients of Gazprombank or Raiffeisenbank, this does not pose any problem.

The presumption of free exchange goes both ways. Until March of this year, the sanctioned banks VTB and Rossiya were not formally disconnected from SWIFT. This is despite the fact that the latter was created by “Putin’s banker” Yuri Kovalchuk and serves as a kind of dark symbol of the Kremlin’s financial policy. A number of Russian goods with a strategic purpose were excluded from the sanctions export lists from the very beginning. Among them are fertilizers, wheat, gas, and rare metals. That is, these are not operations of a “shadow fleet” that transports Russian oil under foreign flags, and not the “grey” deliveries of electronic chips to Russia through third countries, at times indistinguishable from outright smuggling. This is a “white” and global circulation of goods and capital, which by the end of the twentieth century had become the basic model. It is already almost impossible to abandon it from within the current system of economic exchange in favor of a new mercantilist isolation.

“Although mercantilism is on the rise, the global economy is still dominated by liberal and neoliberal models”

On the one hand, this means that building neo-mercantilism in a single country is impossible. On the other hand, the sovereignization of economies at the pole that is today associated with the global South, including Russia, inevitably leads to countermeasures for sovereignization in the global North. These include sanctions that channel the circulation of goods and capital, and protectionist measures of national governments in relation to “one’s own” agricultural products, labor, and high-tech industries. Following the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, financial regulators of other countries in the global South began to increase their reserves of physical gold. This trend is still moderate in the global North (if we forget for a moment that the largest gold reserves are in US vaults). But one or two new economic crises may be enough to push these economies to take decisive sovereignist steps.

The emergence of new mercantilism is, of course, not limited to economic policy. The rise to power of new right-wing governments in Europe, which largely rose from criticism of liberal elites and anti-egalitarian policies, is closely associated with the isolationist temptation. Some of these governments, in particular Italy, regularly try to protest European directives, albeit in a very moderate form. In the Netherlands, according to the observations of one of my colleagues, not only the legal market for soft drugs and sex services is shrinking, but also university education for foreign students. The latter is accompanied by rhetoric about the loss of the specificity of the Dutch national culture, the Dutch language and, perhaps most strikingly, religion. Historically, religion in the Netherlands is perceived, of course, differently than in Russia today: not as a sovereign resource, but as a resource of tolerance. But in this reassertion of “Europeanness” through religion there is also a hidden polemic with Islam that accompanies right-wing “Fortress Europe” ideologies.

Regardless of the motives and even the political affiliation of those who find themselves in power today, one can increasingly see attempts at isolationist solutions in response to the costs of free economic exchange. I also mean those on the left who speak of the desirability of return to national politics without European bureaucracy. That is, the sovereignty of resources, including cultural ones, is gradually finding its place in public discussion in the countries of the global North, and not only on the right. The question of whether free economic and cultural exchange will retain its anti-war potential is once again part of the current agenda.

It cannot be ruled out that the sovereignization of the global South in the coming years will push the global North so much that a real, full-blooded war party will be formed in European countries, as well as in the United States. Now such a party is absent from the public stage of European and even North American politics. It will be different from the ministers who today cautiously agree to the growth of military budgets, but at the same time do not fulfill their obligations. These will not even be those rare officials and politicians who loudly demand to be better armed in order to defend themselves against Russia. A real war party, which has not yet been created, will demand from the United States and Europe an offensive and victorious war on Russian territory. Such a party, as always, will include big business. After all, war is a huge market.

Over the past two years, we learned about German and French enterprises that continue to be involved in supplying the warring parties on both sides of the front line. These secret affairs can potentially, and with great benefit, be translated into open ideology. In this case, the neomercantilist expansion of the global North will no longer be promoted by Kremlin threats, but by the internal development of neoliberal trends. Interest in expanding the arms market can radicalize the military establishment, intelligence and the entire state apparatus. It leads to the militarization of European economies and to the emergence of new political forces insisting on the need for a “liberation” war.

All this shows the extent to which the resources of international peace, as well as our expectations associated with them, are inscribed in the post-war European structure. When looking at the economic map of today’s Europe, including Ukraine and Russia, one cannot help but think that the numerous gas pipelines connecting Russia to Europe through Ukraine play a role somewhat similar to the mechanism of the post-war coal and steel agreement. If not for these pipes, then perhaps there would have been even more civilian casualties in Ukraine? Simply because the safety of Ukrainian territory would be of less importance for the Russian and European economies. The fact that the mechanics of economic gain can save lives is of great concern. After all, this is not at all the model that all those who are concerned with issues of social emancipation and justice are ready to defend.

— You have already mentioned that in neo-mercantilist optics, the population is one of the key sovereign resources. And not in terms of productivity, but simply as a physical mass. How and when did Russian authorities stop caring about the labor skills of the population, but only about its numbers?

This happened already at the beginning of the 2000s. Initially, the spokesmen for the program were not even Kremlin officials. On the one hand, these were conservative demographers and publicists. Some of them insisted on completely procreationist and mercantilist theses: not to allow immigration (that is, free circulation of labor), but to encourage Russian women to have children, giving them back their place at the stove and the cradle. On the other hand, significant contributions to the neoconservative consensus were made by some church leaders and church-related agitators who, as recently as twenty years ago, carried out public campaigns against abortion. Since the mid-2000s, the first alliances of regional and federal authorities with these ultra-conservative groups have emerged. And since the beginning of the 2010s, “expert” meetings have actively contributed to the strengthening of alliances, like the ultraconservative “Club of Izborsk” under the leadership of Alexander Prokhanov.

“Interest in expanding the arms market can radicalize the military establishment, intelligence and the entire state apparatus”

Contacts over population management policy between far-right intellectuals, moral activists and state bureaucracies go back to roughly the same period when the Russian economy was being built with protective mechanisms in the form of sovereign wealth funds such as the National Wealth Fund. Moreover, the latter arose not in the fantasies of ultra-conservatives, but in the plans of liberal economists who wanted to protect the national economy from the consequences of international financial crises. Political differences between these forces gradually dissolved into the general dispositif of security. Both talked about security, in different spheres, economic and cultural, and initially understood it in very different ways. As a result, the secondary, subordinated security techniques themselves began to dictate cardinal—and dangerous—political decisions. Today we are witnessing the apotheosis of this merger, when, for example, campaigns against abortion are waged within the framework of regional parliaments, under Z-slogans and with calls for young people to sign up as volunteers for the front.

The interplay between the interests of the far right, fundamentalist activists and government officials is very revealing. What does it show? That today federal policy, not only in its demographic and financial, but also in its cultural dimension, borrows much from the far-right niches, which for a long time remained the lot of the marginalized. In 2014, in the wake of the annexation of Crimea, these fringes were given a large public stage to justify the first war in Ukraine. Very few of them made a public career, but it was they who left the real recipe book for state ideologists, parastate publicists and propagandists like Solovyov. In turn, “effective” propaganda owes much of its success to the neoliberal logic of startups such as Russia Today and “patriotic” Telegram channels. Today, neoliberal tendencies are tightly intertwined with the ideology of the “Russian world.”

— From the neomercantilist logic that you described, it becomes clear why refugees and deported people from Ukraine are sent to the Far East.

—  This is, first of all, the repopulation of an empty territory under the slogan of ensuring its safety. The peculiarity of importing the Ukrainian population, in particular Ukrainian children, is that the government intends not just to Russify them, but to turn them into “Russians.” And here another surprise awaits us. Having opened the report of the Russian Commissioner for Children’s Rights for 2022, you will find in it a program for the renationalization of the demographic gene pool. Such terminology is not used there, but we are talking about what needs to be done with Ukrainian children who have been moved to Russian territory. It would seem that if we follow the logic of kidnapping and revenge, this should be a repressive or radically eugenic reforging of a person. But there we are only talking about bringing children’s knowledge of the institutional structure of the Russian Federation and the Russian language to the norm. It turns out that it is enough to acquire linguistic and cultural competence to become a “natural” Russian.

— So this is not organic racism then.

— Definitely not. And that is why the Kremlin leadership is often a target for criticism from the Russian far right. In a sense, this is not the worst news: the Kremlin’s attitude, which characterizes the population as a resource, is still not set from the standpoint of organic racism. It quite clearly sounds the constructivist motive of a civil nation, picked up back in the 90s. But there is also a basis for severe pessimism, because the colonialist ambitions of current policies have no “natural” limit. And in the next cycle, the model of cultural and political Russification can be easily protested by more radical organic racists, who have long been languishing in line for government positions and resources.