Gas from Siberia: What Does It Mean to Decolonize ‘Economic Relations’?

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 highlighted the complex web of geo-economic and geopolitical interdependencies between Russia, Ukraine and the rest of the world. The energy and resource relationship between Russia and the EU, especially Germany, became one of the central issues. But little attention has been paid to the colonial nature of the gas supplies that have boosted German industry. The exhibition “Leak. The End of the Pipeline” enables a critical examination of this hitherto neglected topic, as Maria Tkachenko shows.

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Today, gas is an essential part of the German-Russian relationship. From the beginning of cooperation in the 1960s until February 2022, both countries have always characterized this relationship as an economic one. At times it was necessary to place the cooperation in a political context – for example, the principle of “change through trade” claimed that this was the way to peaceful coexistence in the polar world of the Cold War (Patrick, 2022). After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, trade was declared a powerful political tool for democratizing a totalitarian society.

Despite the obvious politicization of gas relations between Russia and Germany, this dimension is stubbornly denied by both countries, especially since the launch of the Nord Stream project. Nord Stream 1 was planned, built and commissioned after the Russian-Georgian war (2008) and the Ukrainian-Russian gas conflicts (2005-2006). Work on Nord Stream 2 began in 2015, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the deployment of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine, and its intervention in the war in Syria and the war crimes committed there.

Both the earlier agreements and Nord Stream have provoked reactions from the international community. The US has always opposed the energy dependence of EU countries on the USSR/Russia. This, of course, was in its own economic and political interests: to increase the energy dependence of the EU countries on the USA. Meanwhile, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe argued that the construction of a pipeline bypassing their territories – both Nord Stream pipelines run under the Baltic Sea – would free the Kremlin from restrictions on its aggressive policy towards them (Deutsche Welle, 2022). However, Germany (as one of the leading nations and one of the most powerful economies) and politicians in the European Union did not take these arguments seriously and expanded so-called ‘economic relations.’

After the ‘End of History’

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has brought Germany’s energy dependence on the Russian Federation into sharp relief. The history and analysis of this dependence has been the subject of numerous articles in the international media. In the Western world of liberal pacifism after the ‘end of history,’ the belief in the possibility of cooperating with authoritarian regimes and controlling them through economic ties seemed to be the best recipe against war. The practice, of which ‘pipeline gas’ was the first act, seemed to work perfectly: Russia would not violate international norms in order to continue trading and making a profit.

In August of this year, Nord Stream 2 was back in the headlines. In September, unknown perpetrators planted explosives that damaged three of the four sections of the pipeline. Neither Nord Stream 1 nor Nord Stream 2 are currently operational, but this is not only due to the destruction of the pipelines. Nord Stream 2 was never certified and approved for operation, and Nord Stream 1 stopped delivering gas after Russia fully invaded Ukraine and European countries refused to pay for the service in rubles.

The investigation resulted in an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian citizen. In August, the media focused on the suspect’s alleged escape from Poland to Ukraine and speculation about President Volodymyr Zelensky’s knowledge of and responsibility for the bombing. But both journalists and investigators are struggling to shed light on the matter. The October issue of Le Monde Diplomatique detailed how the investigation is ultimately being blocked or prevented by all European actors out of loyalty to the United States.

“We made a mistake”

Many articles have been written to explain what Germany has failed to understand about Russia, and why it is much easier for an authoritarian Russia to function without economic ties to Germany and Europe than it is for Germany to function without cheap gas, oil, and coal. Germany’s historical responsibility for Ukraine – both during World War II and more recently – and its hesitant response to the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of the eastern regions have also been clearly articulated, though not in the mainstream.

In Germany, public statements such as “we made a mistake,” “Nord Stream 2 was a mistake,” “we did a lot wrong” were made by officials, functionaries, and politicians (Patrick, 2022). What happened as a result? Manuela Schwesig, for example, was publicly criticized for her commitment to Nord Stream 2, but this was not so much to create a clear political situation as it was out of the self-interest of Schwesig’s political opponents, who wanted to attack her position of power as Minister President of the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. A critical reappraisal and analysis of imperial practices, for example by a commission of inquiry and broad social debates, did not take place. And all those who have been lobbying for Russian interests in German foreign and domestic policy for years have not been called to account.

Discovery of the Urengoy gas field

The exhibition “Leak. The End of the Pipeline” by Philipp Goll, Oleksiy Radynski and Hito Steyerl, which can be seen from April to September 2024 at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, also deals with the gas relations between Russia and Germany. In their work, the artists adopt a perspective that is radically different from the established media interpretations and discourses on the gas relations between these countries.

The discourse that an empire constructs and imposes becomes total, and if a nation or nations are unlucky enough to be in the right place at the right time (i.e. to gain independence from empires), they disappear as a subject of history and become part of the empire. Goll, Radynski, and Steyerl’s exhibition tells several stories. On one wall, visitors will find a chronology of the gas contracts between Germany and Russia: “Timeline: The End of the Pipeline” by Philipp Goll. The chronology ranges from the purchase of the pipes by Tsarist Russia from the German company Mannesmann at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries to the ‘sobering up’ of Germany in 2022.

The key to this chronology is the discovery of the Urengoy gas field in the 1960s, whose seemingly ‘inexhaustible’ reserves and Russia’s willingness to sell them at a reasonable price were attractive to industries in West Germany and other European countries that desperately needed resources for their own ambitious development. On the West German side, the driving forces behind the subsequent gas agreement were banks and large corporations (Mannesmann was an active player in this process). The country’s political elite was not among the most vocal supporters of the agreement. On the one hand, the business community argued that the state apparatus should not interfere in free economic relations. On the one hand, the business community argued that the state apparatus should not interfere in free economic relations.

On the other hand, after the end of the Second World War, West German policy was suspicious of all Soviet initiatives at the international level. A possible attack by Soviet forces from the territory of East Germany was expected, and the country was on constant alert. Meanwhile, the USA, which as a superpower and leader of the ‘free world’ exercised imperial influence on the political processes in Western Europe and had experience with conflicts with the USSR on the territory of third countries, took a negative view of any relations between democratic countries and the USSR (Schattenberg, 2022).

“Those who trade do not fight”

The turning point in this story was the inauguration of Willy Brandt as German Chancellor, who became famous for kneeling before the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and actively seeking ways to reconcile with East Germany and the Warsaw Pact countries. Ultimately, the idea of economic interdependence prevailed, along the lines of “those who trade do not fight” (Patrick, 2022).

This approach is not without a certain logic, but at the same time it fails to recognize the political context and ignores the consequences. At the end of the 1960s, the world lived in fear of a possible nuclear war; the democratic states, skeptical of the intentions of the USSR, were constantly arming themselves in preparation for a third world war. An obstacle for the USSR in the arms race was the lack of foreign currency to purchase certain foreign equipment for which there was no equivalent in the Union. By signing the ‘deal of the century,’ as the press called the USSR-Germany gas contract, the Central European country committed itself to providing the Union with foreign currency for decades. What could go wrong?

Another important point that Goll emphasizes in his chronology is the ecological dimension of these relations. On the one hand, the gas relations between (West) Germany and (the USSR) Russia were justified, among other things, by Willy Brandt’s desire to “make the skies over the Ruhr area blue again,” and therefore the use of gas instead of coal was seen as an efficient solution. On the other hand, the Europeans were not interested in the cost of building a gas pipeline, gas production, pipeline construction in northern Russia, and other related infrastructure, and the Soviet authorities cared little about Siberia’s ecosystems.

In the 1970s, however, works appeared that analyzed the ecological catastrophe in the region. Goll refers in particular to the book “The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union” by dissident Boris Komarov (real name Ze’ev Wolfson), which describes the destruction of the tundra ecosystem and the pollution of Lake Baikal.

Colonial practices vs. survival practices

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the film “Where Russia Ends” by Oleksij Radynski. In his interviews, Radynski explains that the idea for the film came from films found in the Kyivnaukfilm archive. This material was shot in the 1980s but never edited into a finished movie. The archive material shows Siberian landscapes, episodes from the lives of the indigenous people, and footage of the interaction between humans and animals in the region. There are also shots of production: workers welding pipes, laying infrastructure, etc. It is not known what the ultimate intentions of the authors of these shots were. However, considering the context – the period of stagnation and suppression of national cultures in the republics – viewers, especially those who grew up in the countries of the former USSR, can imagine the narrative accompaniment to these images.

In working with the material, Radynski uses the technique of inversion, in which an object is reinvented and its message is changed while its original form is (partially) preserved. The footage filmed by Ukrainians about Siberia and its people, riches and landscapes is accompanied by a soundtrack that introduces the viewer to the history of the region’s occupation and Russia’s colonial practices: From the renaming of local ethnic groups (Tungus instead of Evenks, Hezhen instead of Golden, Luoravetlanen instead of Chukchi) to indifference to the habitats and migrations of local fauna, which threatened the survival of both animals and indigenous people.

In the materials for his video project, Radynski points out that he consulted with members of indigenous peoples while working on the narrative, which allowed him to give the nameless – in this case, with a distorted name – space to tell their story. The soundtrack, in the form of diary entries, also informs the viewer about the attempts of the peoples of Siberia to gain political subjectivity in 1990, when one region of Siberia after another declared its state sovereignty. For a better understanding, all the national republics that later declared their independence and broke away from the imperial center went through this phase. The Russian regions declared their state sovereignty in order to expand their political subjectivity or, as in the case of Tatarstan and Ichkeria, to become independent. Russia under President Yeltsin stopped the emancipation of the regions, returned Tatarstan and started a war with Ichkeria.

It is important to understand that the film crew from Ukraine was itself under (Soviet) occupation in the 1980s, and their point of view reflected Russia’s imperial view of Siberia. It was a kind of symbolic occupation of the land that was physically occupied by the common metropolis. The contemporary audio sequence, which transforms the archive material into an educational film telling the story of the occupation and genocide of the indigenous peoples of the North, breaks the cycle of colonial entropy and postulates colonial solidarity instead.

Who ‘owns’ the natural resources?

Radynski positions his finished film as an anti-colonial road movie. This means that the central idea of the whole work is present in the exhibition space: Siberia and its ethnic groups are under Russian occupation. Siberia, with all its natural resources, does not belong to Russia, but is being exploited by its ruling class according to the colonial logic of taking everything that could be valuable or useful from the colony and treating the land more like a warehouse than a home to be cared for. With this idea, the artist contributes to the current debate on the decolonization of Russia. He expresses the desire to give the occupied peoples and ethnic groups the opportunity to achieve political subjectivity. It also raises questions such as “What is Ukraine’s victory in the Ukrainian-Russian war?” and “What is Russia’s loss?”

The attempt to develop strategies to prevent similar wars in the future leads the Western imperial world to imagine a Russia without imperial ambitions. The position calling for the physical division of the Russian Federation into independent states has supporters all over the world, but certainly not a majority in Russia. The accusation that the West wants to divide Russia is one of the oldest pillars of Kremlin propaganda. Another proposal in the West is not to divide Russia, but to democratize it, to decentralize it, and to grant all peoples political subjectivity in federal territories or autonomies, not only on paper, but also in practice. Proponents of this position do not offer a realistic protocol for the transformation of imperial Russia into a community of sovereign autonomous states, but they actively advance arguments against the collapse of the Russian Federation.

These arguments include: the world will have not one but several states with nuclear arsenals; disintegration means chaos in power and struggle for power; the likelihood of civil wars increases. All of these factors, according to the proponents of the second theory, will have much more dire consequences for national minorities than living in a democratic state (which does not currently exist). It is sobering that there is no popular demand for secession and independence in Russia, even among representatives of ethnic groups. After all, it is impossible to achieve independence without a desire for it. It is well known that the Russian authorities control the media, so there is no certainty about the presence or absence of politically active citizens of the national federations and no way to know their views and aspirations without censorship.

At the same time, one can find on the Internet interviews with political actors in Siberia from the late 1980s and early 1990s, projects by contemporary non-white activists who have fled abroad from Vladimir Putin’s regime, and their visions for the future of their region in a democratic and decentralized Russia that allows countries to elect their own governments, pursue independent international and domestic policies, and practice their own languages, religions, and cultures. The Siberian activist’s dream of having his region recognized as an international territory, where UN peacekeepers would station their troops, sounded desperate. In the context of this debate, Radynski’s approach sounds direct and therefore radical. (Summary of texts and interviews by Saltajev, 2023; Schtepa, 2019; Tarasov, 2013; Sulyandziga & Berezhkov, 2023)

“Act of friendship”

The third part of the exhibition, “Leakage” by Hito Steyerl, shows screens on a large wall through which images move like a liquid or gaseous substance in pipes. The main theme of what is shown is the formation of a discourse around this pipeline as an ‘act of friendship between the German and Russian (Soviet) people.’ An important tool for its construction is culture. For example, private companies such as Mannesmann AG, Deutsche Bank, and Ruhrgas AG cooperated with the USSR Ministry of Culture to organize exhibitions of Russian (Soviet) art and show them in Germany. Art from Germany was exhibited in the Soviet Union. These cultural projects were called a ‘cultural pipeline’ (sic!), which brought both cultures closer together and added value to the gas contracts.

A special feature of this section of the exhibition is the reconstruction of a four-minute WDR television report. The report focuses on officials from Germany and the Soviet Union enthusiastically discussing the benefits of cooperation. At the end of the video, the German official asks his colleague if he knows a joke about ‘the Chukchi.’ He then adds that he doesn’t know if he’s allowed to tell such jokes because ‘the Chukchi’ don’t like them, just as ‘the Frisians’ don’t like jokes about ‘the Frisians’. ‘The Frisians’ are an ethnic group, an indigenous people of the coastal countries of Germany, the Netherlands and southern Denmark, who enjoy the status of a national minority and protection in Germany. Since 2007, the political party Die Friesen has been fighting for political representation of the Frisians in the government, but it was dissolved last year. So-called Frisian jokes belong to the group of chauvinistic jokes about representatives of other peoples/nationalities, in which they appear stupid and primitive.

Reading Goll’s timeline and watching Radynski’s film, I understand that the artists are dealing with another history of colonialism in which the metropolis has won and completely controls the discourse. Therefore, there is no discussion about the occupation of these peoples and their land. Somewhat surprisingly, the ruling classes in West Germany were aware of the colonial violence, which did not prevent them from being confidants and beneficiaries.

“Eastward expansion of living space”

The context in which Hito Steyerl’s work and all the statements about Germany’s dependence on Russia and its refusal to become an unconditional ally of Ukraine in the fight against the Russian invasion stand – this context forces us not least to return to the experience of the Second World War and the place that Ukrainian territory occupied in the colonial-imperial fantasies of the Nazis. While the desire for a ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ (and its successful implementation in all places of mass executions and death camps) is discussed internationally, another goal, no less important and desirable for Adolf Hitler, was to ‘transform the Ukrainian and Belarusian lands into an ideal living space for the idyllic cultivation by German farmers.’

To this end, the Ukrainian and Belarusian population was to be radically reduced (it is no secret that Hitler had plans to starve the population of major Ukrainian cities), while the survivors were to be treated as slaves. This plan was not carried out because Hitler changed his mind. His plan to overthrow the Communist government in Moscow and then destroy Moscow and St. Petersburg failed, the Red Army began to advance and retake the occupied territories, and he therefore did not have the time and means to carry out a mass murder of this magnitude (Snyder, 2010). This Nazi colonial dream has not been widely discussed or addressed in Germany. This neglect ultimately leaves us with modern Germans (Traverso, 2022) who are very reluctant to offend Russians because of all that they did to them in World War II. For the Ukrainians and Belarusians occupied by the Soviets, this sense of guilt is simply absent, and it is hard not to suspect imperial superiority over the so-called small nations.

Recently, it was revealed that Jörg Dornau, a member of the Bundestag for the AfD (Alternative for Germany), owns a farm in Belarus. Dornau employed political prisoners in Belarus to work on his farm. The AfD politician regularly visited the farm and monitored the progress of the work. The cooperation began in 2020, the year of the revolutionary protests against Alexander Lukashenko, who had once again falsified the elections. No wonder the right-wing forces in Saxony (the state where Dornau is a member of parliament) see no problem in this: turning Belarus into an agricultural paradise and controlling the labor of prisoners is a literal reimagining of Hitler’s plans for the countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

Jointly exploiting colonies

Ultimately, by telling the story of the dependence of a free, democratic, and liberal Germany on an authoritarian and despotic Russia, the exhibition shows how empires can easily agree on and exploit colonies together. And in doing so, it points to a larger context – namely, how coloniality and imperality can persist and accompany each other in a world focused on economic profit.

Since the colonial nature of the gas contract between Russia and Germany was not mentioned in any of the journalistic or academic documents I read in preparation for this article, I am tempted to be optimistic and say that the artistic contributions of Goll, Radynski, and Steyerl have opened a breach in the international discourse of blindness, ignorance, and deliberate silence about the fact that Siberia is occupied by Russia and that the gas there does not belong to Russia. Time will tell if this is true or not. Ukrainians can only repeat Oleksiy Radynski’s moral-political imperative: all Russian-occupied territories will be liberated one day.

Editor’s note: The bibliography for this article can be found here. The Ukrainian version of the article can be found on ArtsLooker.