Petrostato e petrocultura nella Russia di Putin

L’invasione dell’Ucraina come rifiuto della gaiamodernità

Abstract

In his latest book Russia Against Modernity, first published in 2023 by Polity (Cambridge) and translated into Italian in 2025 (Bollati Boringhieri, Torino), the Russian scholar Alexander Etkind interprets the recent invasion of Ukraine as part of the stop-modernism project pursued by the government of Vladimir Putin. By defining the Russian Federation as a petrostate, the author analyzes the attempts of the ruling elite to preserve a socio-political model based on paleomodernity, in contrast with the emerging paradigm of gaiamodernity, which promotes a balance between human societies and the environment. The main merit of this work lies in clearly identifying the strong link between the management of natural resources, forms of political power, and the emergence of specific ideological and cultural models in contemporary Russia. At the same time, Etkind imagines a possible future scenario of defederation as a consequence of the revanchist war against a sovereign state.