‘Upper Volta with Gas’? Russia as a Semi-Peripheral State

Abstract

Speaking in respect of Russia’s energy conflict with Ukraine at the end of 2005, Aleksandr Lebedev, millionaire businessman and erstwhile deputy of the Russian State Duma, referred to Russia as ‘Upper Volta with gas’ (Parfitt 2006) in a deliberate echo of the widespread suggestion that the Soviet Union in the early 1980s had become ‘Upper Volta with rockets’, a third world state that just happened to have nuclear weapons. Like the Potëmkin villages of the eighteenth century, which were all façade and no substance, the Soviet Union had become a Potëmkin state. Now, Lebedev was saying, the changes that had taken place since 1991 had left Russia essentially unaltered — the nuclear façade had simply been replaced by energy.