Putin’s Dream: An Energy Superpower /
Out here in Omsk, on the southwestern edge of Siberia, Russia’s petroleum trickledown lights up the dark autumnal nights. Omsk, a black-collar city of 1.3 million, nearly the size of Dallas with all the luster of Albany, is a boomtown. Welders’ sparks illuminate the condo towers rising fast. And out at the refinery – the largest in Russia – oil flares that burn all night at the edge of civilization mark the promise of the future.
For those who imagine that Russia’s revival has not yet to reach Siberia, Omsk offers a vantage point on how far Russia has evolved under Vladimir Putin. Not only do Jaguars and Range Rovers now crowd out the tired Ladas and Zhigulis along Lenin Prospekt, but Euro-style cafes and boutiques brighten the avenues still struggling to arise from the Soviet hangover. The emergent generation, as dynamic and entrepreneurial as any west of the Urals, is in no hurry to head for the exits. And Omsk offers a glimpse beyond the Age of Putin, with its rebirth of the centralized state apparat, distaste for Jeffersonian democracy, and constriction of civil liberties, toward something new, the world’s first energy superpower.
“After Georgia.” The phrase now resounds from Houston to London, marking the end of the postSoviet era in U.S.-Russian relations. Following the Kremlin’s five-day war in the Caucasus, Western politicians and oil executives sit and fret. Russia is back. But Putin’s ambition is neither to reignite the Cold War, nor to rebuild the Soviet empire.
He is winning back Russia’s place in the world not with tanks but banks, not on battlefields but in boardrooms.
In Omsk, once the nest egg of Putin’s favorite oligarch, Roman Abramovich, and now the preserve of Gazprom, the state-controlled natural gas giant, the battle lines are clear.
“It’s no longer just about oil but economic growth and independence,” a former director of the Omsk refinery told me. If during Putin’s first years the goal was to keep fields pumping, the new challenge lies downstream, the energy consumer markets of the West and East.
“It’s a war for control of the spigot,” added Andrei Illarionov, once Putin’s chief economic advisor, now in self-exile in Washington.
Russian resentment has fed the greatest economic and political resurgence of the new century. The West, meantime, has squandered a historic chance at a slice of Russia’s oil and gas fields. American diplomats and executives have been outmaneuvered from Siberia, across Central Asia, to the Caucasus.
As the United States headed into its worst financial crash since Herbert Hoover, Russia waged a victorious little war in Georgia, showing Mikheil Saakashvili to be a feckless upstart and NATO as an outdated alliance. Now, amid talk of a new cold war, Russia is reclaiming its sphere of influence across old Soviet lands and beyond.
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