The Golden Billion: Russia, COVID, Murderous Global Elites

This essay tells the story of the hot, brooding summer that preceded Russia's "special military operation" attack on Ukraine: an attack that could not legally be called a war and that many people in Russia supported even while they neither trusted the media nor cared to talk about politics. Rallying support for this undeclared war, Russian state rhetoric drew on images of WWII fascism, NATO expansion, and morally rotten transnational elites: themes resonant with long-standing feelings of hurt national pride and personal abandonment in the face of spiraling social stratification. To many of its supporters, "the war seemed a relief after many years of stagnation," wrote the Moscow-based journalist Shura Burtin (2022). "Like a fire in prison: at least there'll be some commotion." This essay describes a high point of this pregnant stagnation. Written in August 2021, it draws on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in North-Western Russia to examine the idea that a "Golden Billion" of the world's most powerful people governs to exterminate the rest of us-at a moment when this idea seemed eminently reasonable.