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Bringing Oil to Life: Corporations and Conspiracies in Russian Oil Documentaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2019

Douglas Rogers
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Abstract

This article examines several documentary films made by and about the Russian oil industry in the period from 2003 to 2016, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which they portray intersections between oil and post-Soviet “life.” It divides these films into two major sub-genres: the corporate documentary (2003-present) and the conspiracy documentary (most widespread after about 2012). Corporate documentaries have been instrumental in fashioning new, post-Soviet links between the oil industry and everyday life, especially through “commodity chain” documentaries shown widely on television and in other media. The conspiracy films of the 2010s then extended these commodity chains into the realm of shadowy international cabals and, in some cases, fantastic alien worlds. Together, these sub-genres speak to the cultural imagination of life in Russia as a petrostate, complete with agents and victims, usable pasts and presents, and a variety of energopolitical subject positions that viewers might inhabit and shift among. Although oil documentaries and science fiction generated around the world have long imagined non-hydrocarbon energy futures for humankind, recent Russian oil documentaries in both sub-genres envision a world in which oil and human life will become ever more tightly enmeshed.

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Articles
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Slavic Review , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , Spring 2019 , pp. 50 - 73
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

I am grateful to the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany for hosting a workshop at which Margarita Balmaceda, Simon Blakey, Per Högselius, Thane Gustafson, Heiko Pleines, Andrian Prokyp, and Peter Rutland helped me think through an early draft of this article. Harriet Murav and three reviewers shaped the final version with incisive, detailed, and generous suggestions. I am in their debt.

References

1. Neft΄ i Krov΄ (Oil and Blood). Directed by Pavel Romanov. Moscow: Gvardiia Production Center, 2016.

2. My attention to the articulation of oil and life draws inspiration from a number of studies of oil, life, and cultural production dedicated to other times and places, including Black, Brian C., “Oil for Living: Petroleum and American Conspicuous Consumption,” Journal of American History 99, no. 1 (2012): 40–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; LeMenager, Stephanie, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (New York, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Huber, Matthew, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (Minneapolis, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6. For one study that takes up this general issue from a quite different starting point than the present article, see, for example, the shifts in geographical imaginations theorized in Bouzarovski, Stefan and Bassin, Mark, “Energy and Identity: Imagining Russia as a Hydrocarbon Superpower,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101, no. 4 (2011): 783–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Peter Rutland suggests that a good number of Russian elites push back at the notion of Russia as hydrocarbon superpower; see, “Petronation? Oil, Gas, and National Identity in Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 31, no. 1 (2015): 66–89.

7. On the importance of visual representations of “the Russian idea” and other issues of national identity, especially on television, see Laruelle, Marlene, “The ‘Russian Idea’ on the Small Screen: Staging National Identity on Russia’s TV,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 22, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 313–33Google Scholar; Hutchings, Stephen and Rulyova, Natalia, Television and Culture in Putin’s Russia (London, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hutchings, Stephen and Tolz, Vera, Nation, Ethnicity, and Race on Russian Television: Mediating Post-Soviet Difference (London, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Both sub-genres also add some specifically Russian and postsocialist dimensions to the venerable global genre of the oil documentary; see Sorkhabi, Rasul, “Historical Documentary Films on Petroleum Industry,” Oil-Industry History 13, no. 1 (2012): 187–92Google Scholar; Szeman, Imre, “The Cultural Politics of Oil: On Lessons of Darkness and Black Sea Files,” Polygraph 22 (2010): 3–15Google Scholar; Szeman, Imre, “Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries,” Journal of American Studies 46, no. 2, Special Issue on Oil Cultures (May 2012): 423–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Takach, Geo, “Visualizing Alberta: Dueling Documentaries and Bituminous Sands,” in Boschman, Robert and Trono, Mario, eds., Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene (Waterloo, Ontario, Can., 2014)Google Scholar; Vasi, Ion Bogdan, Walker, Edward T., Johnson, John S., and Tan, Hui Fen, “‘No Fracking Way!’ Documentary Film, Discursive Opportunity, and Local Opposition against Hydraulic Fracturing in the United States, 2010 to 2013,” American Sociological Review 80, no. 5 (October 2015): 934–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bozak, Nadia, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, 2012)Google Scholar.

9. Abu-Lughod, Lila, “Egyptian Melodrama: Technology of the Modern Subject?” in Ginsburg, Faye, Abu-Lughod, Lila, and Larkin, Brian, eds., Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley, 2002), 116Google Scholar; see also many of the other essays in the Media Worlds collection.

10. Ruth Mandel, “A Marshall Plan of the Mind: The Political Economy of a Kazakh Soap Opera,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, 211–28.

11. Grant, Bruce, “The Good Russian Prisoner: Naturalizing Violence in the Caucasus Mountains.” Cultural Anthropology 20, no. 1 (Feb. 2005): 39–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Oil is not, of course, the only domain in which the category of life has been debated in post-Soviet Russia; indeed, reformulations of what life entails have been central to the entire post-Soviet period across a number of domains. On the ways in which the entire “transition” period of the 1990s might usefully be described as a time in which everyday life took on outsized importance, as familiar encompassing structures disappeared with the abrupt end of socialism and commonplace activities took on uncommon significance, see Burawoy, Michael and Verdery, Katherine, eds., Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Lanham, 1999)Google Scholar. Members of the last Soviet generation searched eagerly for “normal life,” a search that often led them—and indeed Russians of all generations—into the bewildering world of post-Soviet politicized consumption, as explored by Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2005)Google Scholar and Shevchenko, Olga, Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Indianapolis, 2009)Google Scholar. More recently, powerful state and corporate representations of everyday life have roared back from their ebb tide in the 1990s, and debates and experiments involving life, death, and potential rebirth have surged in both religious and secular registers, topics explored in Rogers, Douglas, “The Oil Company and the Crafts Fair: From Povsednevnost΄ to Byt in Postsocialist Russia” in Cavender, Mary, Chatterjee, Choi, Petrone, Karen, and Ransel, David L., eds., Everyday Life in Russia: Past and Present (Bloomington, 2015)Google Scholar; Bernstein, Anya, “Freeze, Die, Come to Life: The Many Paths to Immortality in Post-Soviet Russia,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 4 (November 2015): 766–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bernstein, Anya, “Love and Resurrection: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia,” American Anthropologist 118, no. 1 (March 2016): 12–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the same years, less realist genres of Russian cultural production have offered up their own explorations of new forms of life, notably in the rise of what Alexander Etkind calls “magical historicism,” a literary and filmic world often inhabited by ghosts, vampires, zombies, werewolves, and other not-quite or no-longer living creatures—see Etkind, Alexander, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied (Stanford, 2013)Google Scholar.

13. In a quickly growing scholarship see, for instance, Barrett, Ross and Worden, Daniel, eds., Oil Culture (Minneapolis, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Appel, Hannah, Mason, Arthur, and Watts, Michael, eds., Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas (Ithaca, 2015)Google Scholar; Apter, Andrew, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil (Edmonton, Alberta, Can., 2016), and Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, ed. Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman (Montreal, 2017).

14. On socialist oil, see Rogers, Douglas, The Depths of Russia: Oil, Power, and Culture after Socialism (Ithaca, 2015), 33–70Google Scholar

15. See Russell, Patrick and Taylor, James Piers, eds., Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-war Britain (London, 2010), 87–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Canjels, Rudmer, “From Oil to Celluloid: A History of Shell Films” in van Zanden, J. Luiten, eds., A History of Royal Dutch Shell, Vol. 4 (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar.

16. Mona Damluji, “The Image World of Middle Eastern Oil,” in Appel, Mason, and Watts, eds., Subterranean Estates, 147–64.

17. Vitalis, Robert, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, 2007): 121–23Google Scholar.

18. A small sampling of region-based films focused on the oil industry would include Kachaia Neft΄: Real΄nye Budny. Directed by Egor Kovlegin and Aleksei Khaniutin. Moscow: TMC Group and Discovery Channel, 2015 (about Almatevsk in Tatarstan); Liudi Nefti. Omsk: Films at Work, 2010 (about the Omsk Oil Refinery); and Vankor—Sila Liudei. Krasnoyarsk, Russia: Rosneft΄, 2012 (about Rosneft΄).

19. See also Wenzel, Jennifer, “Consumption for the Common Good?: Commodity Biography Film in an Age of Postconsumerism” Public Culture 23, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 573–602CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Tynkkynen, “Energy as Power,” 376. A robust comparative analysis of documentaries produced by the oil and gas industries is beyond the scope of this article, but would be instructive along several axes. For instance, the fact that there has long been a global market for oil but only a regional market for gas (recent innovations in Liquified Natural Gas notwithstanding), means that the gas industry is entirely absent from the global conspiracy sub-genre of documentary. A comparative analysis within Russia itself would need to take account of other differences between these industries, including quite different geographies and privatization histories.

21. Vankor—Sila Liudei (Krasnoyarsk, 2012).

22. Neft΄ v Dvizhenii, Directed by Robert Frantsev. Moscow: Rossiia-24, 2016.

23. Although not a corporate documentary, perhaps the most well-known of these commodity chain documentaries is Truba (directed by Vitaliy Manskiy. Prague: Vertov Studio 2016), which follows the Druzhba pipeline from Siberia to Germany. Appropriately enough for the theme of life and death, the film ends in a crematorium, where both humans and gas are consumed.

24. Neft΄ eto zhizn΄. Perm΄, Russia: Kucher, 2004.

25. See also Rogers, Depths of Russia.

26. Oil is Life appeared in conjunction with a number of other projects making similar points, including omnipresent Lukoil-sponsored festivals around the Perm΄ region and books such as Neroslov, A. N., Permskii period: Vagit Alekperov i ego komanda (Perm΄, 2009)Google Scholar, and Markelova, O. A., Istoriia dobychi nefti v Permskoi oblasti, 1928–2004 gody (Perm΄, 2004)Google Scholar. For a time in the late 2000s, Lukoil gas stations in the Perm΄ region flew flags proclaiming “Lukoil—The Energy of Life” and “Lukoil-For the Good of the Perm΄ region.”

27. Compare Wengle, Susanne, Post-Soviet Power: State-led Development and Russia’s Marketization (New York, 2015)Google Scholar. On corporate sponsorship of non-documentary films, see Stephen M. Norris, Blockbuster History in the New Russia: Movies, Memory, and Patriotism (Bloomington, 2012), 251–70.

28. Neft΄ eto zhizn΄.

29. On these points, see Rajak, Dinah, “Corporate Memory: Historical Revisionism, Legitimation, and the Invention of Tradition in a Multinational Mining Company,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 37, no. 2 (November 2014): 259–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Kalinina, Ekaterina, “Beyond Nostalgia for the Soviet Past: Interpreting Documentaries on Russian Television,” Memory, Post-socialism and the Media, a special issue of European Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 3 (June 2017): 285–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. Boyer, “Energopower: An Introduction,” 325.

31. See, for instance, KamKabel΄—55 let. Itogi, Studio Lime for PR-Proekt, 2012; Permskie Motory—80 let, Perm΄: Masterskaia Dobrykh Film΄ov for Perm΄ Motors, 2014; and Odin den΄ na Permskom motornom zavode, 2013.

32. Monani, Salma, “Energizing Environmental Activism? Environmental Justice in Extreme Oil: The Wilderness and Oil on Ice,” Environmental Communication 2, no. 1 (March 2008): 119–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gaines, Jane M., “Political Mimesis,” in Gaines, Jane M. and Renov, Michael, eds., Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis, 1999), 84–102Google Scholar; Hinegardner, Livia, “Action, Organization, and Documentary Film: Beyond a Communications Model of Human Rights Videos,” Visual Anthropology Review 25, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 172–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McLagan, Meg, “Introduction: Making Human Rights Claims Public,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (March 2006): 191–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33. See, for instance, Nikolai Trukhokin, “Snimaetsia Kino,” Permskaia Neft΄ 8 (182), April 2006.

34. Permskii Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (PermGANI) fond 1206, opis΄ 1 (t.3), delo 1037 (Documents about the realization of the “Moving Together with Lukoil” Project).

35. Trukhokin, “Snimaetsia Kino.”

36. VI Konkurs Sotsial΄nykh i Kulturnykh Proektov (Perm΄, 2007).

37. Trukhokin, “Snimaetsia Kino.”

38. These relationships are ongoing. In June of 2017, Gazprom-Export announced that it was spending €1.5 million to hire a German documentary filmmaker to produce a film featuring the most beautiful natural areas of Russia. See “‘Gazprom Eksport΄ potratit 1.5 mln. Evro na documental΄nyi fil΄m o krasotakh Rossii.” Obshchaia Gazeta, June 8, 2017.

39. On the similarities of social theory and conspiracy theory, see Pelkmans, Mathijs and Machold, Rhys, “Conspiracy Theories and their Truth Trajectories,” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 59 (2011): 66–80Google Scholar.

40. Borenstein, Eliot, Plots Against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy After Socialism (Ithaca, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. The old guideline that conspiracy documentaries rarely make it big because—in contrast to corporate documentaries—they rarely have major funding behind them does not apply in recent Russia. See Bjørn Sørenssen, “Digital Diffusion of Delusions: A World Wide Web of Conspiracy Documentaries,” in Kate Nash, Craig Hight, and Catherine Summerhayes, eds., New Documentary Ecologies: Emerging Platforms, Practices and Discourses (New York, 2014), 201–18, for an overview of conspiracy documentaries and the claim that lack of funding has typically kept them marginal. Among relevant studies of Russian conspiracy theory, see especially Marlene Laruelle, “Conspiracy and Alternate History in Russia: A Nationalist Equation for Success?,” The Russian Review 71, no. 4 (October 2012): 565–80, which sees them as one mode of the production of “alternate histories”—an approach with which my own analysis certainly conforms; in the same issue, see also Stefanie Ortmann and John Heathershaw, “Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet Space,” 551–64; and Richard Sakwa, “Conspiracy Narratives as a Mode of Engagement in International Politics: The Case of the 2008 Russo-Georgian War,” 581–609; Ilya Yablokov, “Conspiracy Theories as a Russian Public Diplomacy Tool: The Case of Russia Today (RT),” Politics 35, no. 3–4 (2015): 301–15.

42. Bitva za Neft΄, Directed by Iu. Satarova. Moscow: Mainstream Television Company, 2012.

43. Ibid.

44. Documentary film was only one of several modes in which oil appeared in various kinds of Russian conspiracy thinking and debates about conspiracy thinking in the past decade. As oil prices fell rapidly in 2014, some of the tamer versions of the conspiracies explored in these documentaries were commonly discussed in mainstream Russia media publications such as Forbes (Vladimir Mirov, “Teoriia zagovora: pochemu Rossiiu ne udast΄sia nakazat΄ snizheniem tsen na neft΄,” Forbes, February 4, 2014). Moreover, many of the experts interviewed in the documentaries discussed in this article also have books, blogs, and other platforms, where they frequently offer expert opinions on all manner of topics, including but not limited to the intersections of oil, crisis, and currency that the documentaries focus on. For example, Mikhail Khazin, appearing as an expert on oil and international currency in Blood and Oil (see below), has been a frequent guest on Russian television and radio stations across the political spectrum. Mikhail Deliagin, featured several times in The Battle for Oil, is the author of the book The 100-Dollar Government: But What if the Price of Oil Falls? (Moscow, 2012) and dozens of articles about oil and international politics. Both Khazin and Deliagin have extensive social media presences on the Aurora platform (khazin.ru and deliagin.ru). Among the less mainstream personalities appearing in these documentaries is the controversial but widely-known faith healer, mystic, and author Nikolai Levashov, who suggests in The Battle for Oil that NASA has covered up evidence of hydrocarbon lifeforms elsewhere in the solar system. See also Borenstein’s discussion of the “Houston Project” in Plots Against Russia, Chapter 2.

45. Battle for Oil uses the same technique in a different way, including nodding pumpjacks as part of the graphic used to introduce and identify experts interviewed for the documentary.

46. Neft΄ i Krov΄.

47. Many Western documentaries about oil forecast a coming crisis, whether ecological/environmental, the inevitable outcome of “peak oil,” or both. Indeed, Imre Szeman suggests that one of the primary categories of oil documentary is “eco-apocalyptic” (Szeman, “Crude Aesthetics”). Many oil films, including A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash (directed by Basil Gelpke. Zurich: Lava productions AG, 2006), one of the films Szeman discusses, also employ the Koyaanisqatsi-style “life out of balance” technique favored by both The Battle for Oil and Blood and Oil. On oil temporalities, see also Mandana E. Limbert, In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town (Palo Alto, 2010).

48. On post-Soviet crises, see especially Shevchenko, Crisis and the Everyday; Rogers, Depths of Russia, and Caroline Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism (Ithaca, 2002).

49. Although many of the claims made in these conspiracy documentaries depart sharply from mainstream scholarly opinion, it is worth noting that the view that falling international oil prices played at least some part in the unraveling of the Soviet Union has become common both in and beyond Russia. See, for instance, Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia (Washington D.C., 2007), and Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (Oxford, 2001). Although Gaidar points to an anti-Soviet alliance between the United States and Saudi Arabia (107), neither author suggests that the oil price declines of the 1980s were part of an intentional effort to bring down the Soviet Union altogether.

50. In this, they replicate in many ways an earlier set of post-Soviet imaginations of, and anxieties about, newly-salient monetary exchange analyzed by Katherine Verdery, “Faith, Hope, and Caritas in the Land of the Pyramids: Romania, 1990 to 1994,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 4 (October 1995): 625–69; Alaina Lemon, “‘Your Eyes are Green like Dollars’: Counterfeit Cash, National Substance, and Currency Apartheid in 1990s Russia,” Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 1 (February 1998): 22–55; Douglas Rogers, “Moonshine, Money, and the Politics of Liquidity in Rural Russia” American Ethnologist 32, no. 1 (February 2005): 63–81; and Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life. On the mid-century creation of a linkage between the international monetary system and imaginations of a limitless oil supply—and the implications of this linkage for the shape of the postwar global order—see Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London, 2013).

51. The film does concede that the global elite now includes a number of Russians in the oil and gas industry, but it is careful to exclude these elites from the global conspiracies of the Bilderberg Group, noting that the only Russian participants at the Bilderberg meetings have been Anatolii Chubais and Garry Kasparov—the first deeply unpopular for his guidance of 1990s privatizations, the second an outright and vocal critic of the Russian government.

52. Neft΄ i Krov΄

53. For a brief overview of this effort, see Alfred Champagnat, “Protein from Petroleum,” Scientific American 213, no. 4 (October 1965): 13–17. BP, especially at its Grangemouth refinery complex in Scotland, was a major western participant. On synthetic protein supplements, see Douglas Rogers, “Was the Microbe a Proletarian? Energy, Life, and Labor in the Cold War” (unpublished manuscript, Yale University, February 2019).

54. On “eco-apocalyptic” oil films, see Szeman, “Crude Aesthetics.”

55. See Glasby, Geoffrey P., “Abiogenic Origin of Hydrocarbons: An Historical Overview,” Resource Geology 56, no. 1 (March 2006): 83–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Cole, Simon R., “Which Came First, the Fossil or the Fuel?” Social Studies of Science, 26, no. 4 (November 1996): 733–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. Carolina Martinez, “Titan’s Surface Organics Surpass Oil Reserves on Earth,” NASA, at www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html (last accessed February 7, 2019).

57. For versions of NASA’s own reporting on these discoveries, see, for instance, Andrew Hough, “Titan: Nasa Scientists Discover Evidence ‘that Alien Life Exists on Saturn’s Moon’,” The Telegraph, at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/7805069/Titan-Nasa-scientists-discover-evidence-that-alien-life-exists-on-Saturns-moon.html (last accessed February 7, 2019).

58. Etkind, Warped Mourning; see also Eliot Borenstein, Plots Against Russia.

59. See, especially, Banerjee, Anindita, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity (Middletown, 2012)Google Scholar.