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Sergey Pereslegin
Head of Theoretical Department St. Petersburg School of Scenarios

1

In fact, this story begins many years ago, when Russia lost first the Crimean War, then the Russian-Japanese War. Although there was an important and famous triumph between these two defeats, it was only a victory over Turkey, and the «Turkish team» was not in the «Premier League», a fact that was understood by everyone.

The general conclusion arrived at by the Russian establishment between the Russian-Japanese War and the First World War was brilliantly summed up by Leonid Sobolev: «a military empire, covered with medals in memory of the dozens of wars it had fought, but incapable of war».

To be fair to the ruling elite, it realised this. The period between the first and second Russian revolutions was filled not only with measures to increase the battle-readiness of the troops and the competence of their commanders, but also with concerted efforts to comprehend the fundamental causes of their defeat. Here it has to be said that even such biased and literate critics of the «rotten Imperial regime» as the Bolsheviks saw only the tip of the iceberg. They linked the defeat with the degradation and lethargy of the military hierarchy, the soldiers’ lack of education, Russia’s technical backwardness (incidentally, extreme backwardness in comparison with Japan, which had only recently set out on the road to industrial development), and social factors. All these undoubtedly «had their place», but on a no greater scale than in other wars that the Russian Empire, for better or worse, had won, so creating the world’s largest continental colonial empire.

For many centuries the power and might of Russia was determined by the enormous size of its territory and its huge population. The empire possessed in full measure the two most important resources for traditional development — arable land and a population capable of working it. These resources were converted into numerous army regiments, warships, monumental construction in the capital, and railway projects that were vast by European standards. The defeats by the British-French coalition and Japan showed that the time had come when these resources were no longer effective.

These new conditions saw the arrival of the Commission for the Development of Production Forces in Russia. Its task was to investigate how resources were important in the industrial development phase, whether it was only Russia that had them, and, if so, where they were located and how they could be transformed from potential opportunities into a genuine military and economic force.

It immediately became clear that the dimensions of the country had been transformed from a resource into a potential weakness. In the first place, it was physically impossible to catch Europe in the amount of railway tracks, in spite of any records for laying them (the Trans-Siberian Railway is in the Guinness Book of Records in three nominations: total length, number of stations and speed of construction). Secondly, even the lines that had to be laid for purely strategic reasons would swallow up the entire state budget, while the speed of Russian mobilisation would still lag behind that of the European powers by several weeks. Thirdly, even if it were possible to guarantee industrial development at the same level as Belgium or France, Russian production would still not be competitive, since the average transport obligation in Russia would, in any event, be greater than that in Europe.

The most important result of the Commission’s work was an understanding of the role of the transport and infrastructure connection in the industrial competition of world powers. The October revolution of 1917, industrialisation and the subsequent decades of Soviet history all took place against the background of the battle with deficiencies in the infrastructure. This battle was waged with varying success, but in general the task of building competitive industry in Russia was fulfilled. The role of the Commission in carrying out Soviet economic strategy was very great: suffice it to say that the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia, and later the State Plan, were based on the Commission’s work. Sixteen research institutes «germinated» as the result of the expansion of Soviet industrial design under the Commission for the Development of Production Forces.

In this way, the task of accounting for Russia’s industrial resources (adequate for the industrial development phase) expressed itself in the creation of a large-scale economic strategy, in which the key role was played not by natural resources themselves, though a great deal of attention was paid to them, but their linking through the advanced development of infrastructural components. To put it more simply, it can be said that an adequate mechanism for implementing the Commission’s programme was created only in the 1970s, in the form of the conception of a territorial production complex. It has to be stressed that the revolutionary upheavals were an essential condition for the implementation of an industrialisation programme for the country. Despite all its efforts and in any circumstances, Imperial Russia could never have implemented a structural rebuilding of the economy and an «upgrade» of the population to the needs of the industrial development phase. By 1916 this was evident not only to the most «progressive» members of the ruling elite, but also to the court clique. In actual fact, by 1917 the question of whether there would be a revolution or not was no longer asked. The only matter under discussion was who would come to power, by what means and at what cost. Stolypin was wrong: it is great upheavals that are the key to Russia’s greatness.

The cost of the transformation turned out to be monstrous — in people, in material values and in territory. In the next stage of development the greater part of the lost lands were returned, but not for long. We should bear in mind, however, that the phased reconstruction of an economy is always accompanied by human casualties, and there is no basis for thinking that in the course of industrialisation Russia lost a greater percentage of its population than, say, Britain in the course of its industrial revolution spread over two centuries. «The Sheep Ate The People», is what they said, and continue to say, about that period.

Whatever may be the case, in the first two decades after the revolution (1917-1937) the population of Russia/ the Soviet Union was transformed from a predominantly rural population into a predominantly urban industrial population. Its numbers fell (as a result of emigration, repression and starvation), but its quality improved. By the outbreak of the Second World War the country had fully restored its resources: the traditional «land plus peasants» package had been replaced by an industrial «infrastructures plus personnel» package.

Summary

1. A search for «new resources» is undertaken only in conditions where the national elite recognises the insufficiency of a key package of «old resources» (in the traditional phase — land and peasants).

2. This search necessarily leads to the installation of a new package with resource-connected capabilities (in the industrial phase — infrastructures and personnel).

3. This installation is only possible by revolutionary means (in particularly favourable circumstances in the form of a «revolution from the top»).

4. This revolution is accompanied by substantial public upheavals and significant human and material losses. The «old» and «new» key packages for the management of resources wage a relentless war with one another, and this war is waged throughout the whole country.

5. Degradation of human capital occurs: the social stratum that was previously the basis of productive forces becomes an economically passive «population» under the new conditions. The country begins to experience an acute shortage of manpower, which is overcome, firstly, by personnel logistics, and secondly by the development of adequate educational programmes.

6. The introduction of a new key package for resource management requires the territorial reformation of the country (a new regional policy). In many cases this reformation may lead to territorial losses or increased internal instability.

7. Refusal to install this new key package (for religious reasons, humane considerations or a sense of self-preservation) will lead to the country being transformed into a colony or semi-colony, and, in the future, to the implementation of the same reformations, but under outside control. The «cost» of this scenario can be estimated by the examples of Turkey, China, Korea, and a number of other countries.

2

Human history has usually featured phases of identical activity. We can, therefore, introduce the concept of a phased human wasteland. The archaic, traditional, industrial or cognitive phased human wasteland is territory where the types of activity typical of that phase are either not fulfilled at all, or are fulfilled with very great difficulty. In the archaic human wasteland the food resource is, in fact, exhausted. The basic form of activity in the archaic phase is hunting and gathering, and, sooner or later, on account of the growth of the population, the territory loses its capability to provide the resource that is essential for the biological survival of the growing human population. Man, as an «absolute predator», «eats through the ecosystem», and its biological variety is disastrously reduced: an archaic human wasteland appears, where it is possible to live, of course, but with very great difficulty. Society begins to experience acute food pressure, and there are three possible alternatives, two realistic and one fantastic. The realistic alternatives are degradation, and an attempt to move to a place where the resource is not yet exhausted; the fantastic alternative is an attempt to go over to a different means of organisation and to the use of fundamentally different resources (to complete the phase: to overcome the neolithic barrier and build the traditional phase of development).

We should note that it is possible, in principle, to move any number of times to a place where the resource is not yet exhausted, but if a shortage of that resource has already occurred once, it will be repeated again and again, and will happen more and more quickly. In the end, places on earth where it is possible to move in search of the resource will either simply disappear, or will turn out to be inaccessible to that particular community.

The following traditional phase of development resolves the problem of the archaic human wasteland once and for all. When «one works and six take the pickings», food ceases to be the most valuable commodity. Now the most valuable resource is arable land that can be cultivated and worked. Accordingly, the human wastelands of the traditional phase include lands that have to be taken out of use because of exhaustion, salty soil and other phenomena of that type. In the final analysis, man uses the potential of the land to the full: since he is altering the ecosystem in the area where he lives, and is adjusting the ecosystem to suit himself and his requirements, he becomes not only the supreme manager of a brick in the biological food pyramid, but a designer of ecosystems. This is a different level of development, and it provides far more possibilities. The population and the variety of forms of activity grows quickly, states and civilisations appear… and this has to be paid for by the impoverishment of the soil and building on the land, which has already been ploughed and irrigated, and now cannot be further improved. If we study the history of the American continent, we find that the progress from east to west from ploughed lands to virgin soil occurs with ever increasing speed. Again we see an inevitable human flow, from an area where everything has already been done and where there are already shortages to an area where land can still be found and cultivated.

Whereas in the archaic phase the ecosystem is «eaten through», in the traditional phase, where ecosystems are «assembled» and «dismantled», it is the landscape that is «eaten through».

With the introduction of the steam engine, and railways and ships capable of carrying large cargoes, the area where sowing takes place becomes totally unimportant. Arable land ceases to be an absolute value — it will always be found «somewhere», and if we have ships and railways, we can deliver grain where it is needed cheaply and quickly.

However, it then turns out that in the industrial phase the main activity is the creation and maintenance of communications. Consequently, the industrial phase «eats through» communications.

What does this mean: «eats through» communications? The industrial wasteland is a very special place: a place where, for some reason, building communications is unprofitable.

Naturally, the population begins to move away from this place. Villages and small towns in developed countries become human wastelands. People leave them and move to large cities — to regions of maximum communications.

However, the city begins to show resistance to communications. The «problem of the last mile» occurs. The most difficult thing is to deliver «anything at all» to the end user. Transporting bananas from Africa to a port is easier and cheaper than unloading them and sending them to supermarket shelves.

The city turns out to be an area of high transport resistance. It absorbs more and more people, and communications are «eaten through» fastest of all.

In both the traditional and industrial phases we observe the same result: people flee from areas where a resource is scarce to areas where there is plenty of that resource, but at a given moment the concentration of population becomes so great that even the maximum resource of that phase becomes insufficient. The traditional Rome cannot provide itself with enough food: there are too many people for local production capacity, and importing food is too expensive. The industrial city cannot provide itself with enough food, water, electricity, heat, roads — there are too many people for the limited capacity of the railways and motorways.

The possibilities of the industrial city are, of course, significantly greater than those of the traditional city. For the traditional city the upper limit of development is reached when, as a result of its size, it becomes physically impossible to deliver the food it requires: it will be spoilt in transit (stolen, consumed…). For the industrial city the limit is determined by the physical impossibility of building still more communications. Moscow, for example, experiences a communication crisis every day.

Every time that a phase crisis occurs, the feeling arises that «it’s not that bad». We could just build another ring road! However, this is similar to the reasoning of the Americans in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that they could move still further towards the west and find one more untouched field, or the reasoning of the archaic hunter that he would certainly find and kill one more mammoth. It is quite understandable that the population of industrial centres will grow faster than communications networks. And it will grow, above all, on account of the flow of people from villages and small towns. This flow comes from regions where the construction of communications is unprofitable to regions where it is already impossible to construct more.

The crisis of the phase is essentially caused by the flow of people towards the area of maximum development of the means of production characteristic of this phase.

In the traditional phase the law is executed in the form of barbaric invasions, whereas in the industrial phase it may be reformulated in the following way: all types of capital, including human capital, are drawn to the area of maximum capitalisation, i.e. to major world cities, whereas forms of production tend to go out to areas of less capitalisation and lower costs. That is, to an empty place somewhere. A mechanism is in operation that separates phased production and people. In effect, this creates human wastelands of two types, and the flow of people between them will increase ¹.

The Russian/Soviet Empire came up against this phenomenon in the 1970s in the form of emigration, losses of territorial capitalisation and degradation of personnel. The country virtually began turning into an industrial human wasteland of the first type, not supporting industrial forms of activity. Although it was not as noticeable as in the Crimean or Russian-Japanese Wars, in fact, the Arab-Israeli Wars, the conflict in Afghanistan, the political events in Poland, and the diplomatic defeats in the Middle East all demonstrated the country’s inability to conduct a modern war. The irony is that on this occasion the social revolution, with all its economic, political, humanitarian and territorial «costs», had neither a plan nor an aim. As a result, twenty years of history were senselessly lost ², which, of course, cost far more than Ukraine and Kazakhstan put together, to say nothing of the other republics.

In the last years of the Putin era we have noticed a shift towards the creation of an original Russian post-industrial design system, which has put on the agenda the question of the redescription of the country’s territories and the evaluation of its post-industrial resources. In this case it is appropriate to say: «better late than never, though a pity that it is so late».

3

The fact that the country now has a post-industrial design system clearly presupposes that the main problems of the industrial age have been solved. To a certain extent this means communism’s «material base», whose creation occupied generations of Soviet people.

The foundation of this base is energy: despite the widespread opinion in the West, the post-industrial economy needs immeasurably more energy than the industrial economy, and the development of energy-saving technologies will not help: it reduces the proportional, but not the integral energy consumption of production.

Consequently, the resources of the future will remain the familiar ones of oil, gas, uranium and coke (we will exclude other types of coal, peat, shale and biological fuel from this list because of their low calorie content and their contamination with sulphuric and nitric oxides). Russia has a surplus of these resources, a fact that causes «righteous anger» in many countries. We have already heard several times that «Siberia should be seen as a raw material base for the whole world, not as the individual property of Russia». An important corollary to this thesis is the forecast that Russia will inevitably break up into three states: Russia proper, Siberia and the Far East (sometimes «Russia proper» is additionally said to be set to lose the Volga-Ural Region, the Kaliningrad and Murmansk Regions, but this, of course, is «wishful thinking»).

The rapid expansion of geological exploration in Russia will lead, in all probability, to the discovery of new deposits and, consequently, to the appearance of new areas of conflict. In my view, these additional centres of tension will be located in the district of shelved seas — along the Northern sea route and in the Far East. Sooner or later Russia will declare the Okhotskoye Sea to be part of its territorial waters, whereupon the pieces on the «world chessboard» will begin to move… Russia’s strategic joke in planting a flag at the North Pole was taken seriously by its neighbours: Canada announced it was building «ice-breaking» cruisers, the USA (for some reason) promised to send an aircraft carrier, while other countries confined themselves to verbal protests, which were incomparably cheaper and just as effective.

Another very important industrial resource is transport (infrastructural) communications: lines of communication, including pipes and distributive energy networks, railways, motorways, ports and airports, fibre-optics, the main Internet servers, mobile networks (we exclude telephone networks as a rapidly ageing resource). It is clear that infrastructural resources, however many of them there are, are insufficient for post-industrial (cognitive) development, but it is bad when even the «norms» of the industrial age are not being fulfilled.

In the infrastructural field matters in Russia are not entirely hopeless, and that is the best that can be said. It is essential to bear in mind, however, that our country possesses huge potential infrastructural resources: territories without roads and coastlines without ports. There is no question that these resources will be actively «consumed», both by Russia and by the world community.

Separate mention should be made of the Northern sea route, whose importance as the shortest line of communication between Europe and the Asia-Pacific Region is hard to overestimate. As they approach their climatic optimum, the polar seas will begin to be free of ice, increasing the importance of the Arctic, which is already high anyway, both for its strategic significance for the deployment of rocket-launching submarines and for its supposed reserves of oil.

In describing areas of conflict in the near future, it makes sense to start with the political conflict in the Arctic.

Military conflict is also highly likely in the Asia-Pacific Region, where there is a clash of oil-gas and political interests, and a new super-market is taking shape, where separate states and colonial empires continue to exist, and where frontiers are of a fairly debatable character.

The third important resource is people. When the subject of «demographic problems» is brought up, a typical substitution of concepts occurs. There are more than enough people everywhere in the world, and Russia also has sufficient people. But there are no personnel. Human capital, which is talked about so much both here and in the West, was produced in industrial schools and industrial higher education establishments, and is quickly degrading in the post-industrial period. Today there are not even sufficient personnel for established industrial production, let alone for ambitious programmes for a nuclear revival and a nanotechnological breakthrough. What is needed is new-generation personnel, whom nobody educates and who sometimes just appear, but in totally insufficient numbers.

The battle for this resource will be particularly fierce, but it is necessary to bear in mind that the key positions have already been captured by Anglo-Saxon countries, mainly the USA.

We will make the proviso that the situation will change dramatically when a technology for the «enrichment» of human resources appears. This technology will ensure the resource replenishment of several countries, above all those in Eastern Europe, where some remnants of Soviet education survive, providing fairly rich «ore». One can only imagine how fierce the conflict for this cognitive resource with a soul and consciousness will be ³.

Finally, we will point out as one of the key resources a country’s representation in the «market of the Future», its readiness to fight for this market, proposing and promoting its models of development, its cognitive design system, its vision of the values, aims and threats of the «forthcoming world». Here Russia has historically held quite strong positions. I would suggest that Russia is at least in the «top four» in this respect, along with the USA, Japan and United Europe. The status of an «energy superpower» is good in that it provides the opportunity to set out its position to the world.

The battle for the sphere of ideas describing the Future has been waged for a long time, and now, thanks to the emergence of «advanced» Japanese prognoses, the new developments of the «RAND» Corporation ⁴, the black humour of American kremlinologists concerning the murder of Putin (5), British versions of the Future and the work on Russian development scenarios, it has rapidly heated up. We can expect this «front» to remain active in the next few years, and the «conflicts of images of the Future» to assume not only an international character (the Russian version versus the American one), but also a domestic character. For example, several significant structures advancing concrete versions of the Future have already appeared in Russia. It is inevitable that foreign organisations will also intervene in this «ostensibly purely scientific debate».

It is still too early to talk of the next group of conflicts, connected with the new post-industrial regionalisation of the country and the world in general. It is perfectly clear, however, that the «human wasteland» concept will become broader, forming the concept of cognitive human landscapes. These landscapes will certainly include those whose assimilation will promise significant advantages…

Summary

We can expect a period of bitter conflicts. In the information sphere the conflicts will revolve around images of the Future. In the human sphere the most valuable commodity will be people capable of working with cognitive ideas — a very limited number of people, and, perhaps, systems for training such people. In the sphere of communications the battle will be for regions with unbuilt roads and ports. In the sphere of materials energy resources — oill, gas and uranium — will be of most importance. In territorial terms the conflicts will be grouped in the Arctic, the Far East, and in the most developed areas of the industrial phase: the USA and Japan. However, Russia and the European Union will also not remain on the sidelines in this imminent world conflict.

«General! I’m scared, we’ve come to a dead end.
It’s the revenge of a vast expanse.
Our pikes are rusting. Pikes are
No longer a guarantee of a target.
And our shadows do not go before us
Even in the hour before sunset»
(Joseph Brodsky)