in nuclear “bunker busters,” they still make a bit of a mess and are hard to work into any sort of a sensible strategy that would reliably lead to an increased supply of energy. Noting that conventional weapons have not been effective in this area, it is unclear why nuclear weapons would produce better results.
But these are all details; the point I really want to make is that proposing resource wars, even as a worst-case scenario, is still a form of denial. The implicit assumption is this: if all else fails, we will go to war; we will win; the oil will flow again; and we will be back to business as usual in no time. Again, the Iraqi experience should be enough to sober up anyone still waiting around for the success of a global police action to redirect the lion’s share of the dwindling world oil supplies toward the United States.
Outside this last circle of denial lies a vast wilderness called the Collapse of Western Civilization, roamed by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or so some people will have you believe. Here we find not denial but escapism: a hankering for a grand finale, a heroic final chapter. Civilizations do collapse — this is one of the best-known facts about them — but as anyone who has read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire will tell you, the process can take many centuries.
What tends to collapse rather suddenly — and with far greater regularity than civilizations — is the economy. An economy does not collapse into a black hole from which no light can escape. Instead, something else happens: society begins to spontaneously reconfigure itself, establish new relationships and evolve new rules, in order to find a point of equilibrium at a lower rate of resource expenditure.
Note that the exercise carries a high human cost: without an economy, many people suddenly find themselves as helpless as newborn babes. Many of them die sooner than they would otherwise: some would call this a “die-off.” There is a part of the population that is most vulnerable: the young, the old and the infirm; the foolish and the suicidal. There is also another part of the population that can survive indefinitely on insects and tree bark. Most people fall somewhere in between.
Economic collapse gives rise to new, smaller and poorer economies. That pattern has been repeated many times, so we can reason inductively about similarities and differences between a collapse that has already occurred and one that is about to occur. Unlike astrophysicists, who can confidently predict whether a given star will collapse into a neutron star or a black hole based on measurements and calculations, we have to work with general observations and anecdotal evidence. However, I hope that my thought experiment will allow me to guess correctly at the general shape of the new economy, and arrive at survival strategies that may be of use to individuals and small communities.
The Collapse of the Soviet Union: An Overview
What happens when a modern economy collapses and the complex society it supports disintegrates? A look at a country that has recently undergone such an experience can be most educational. We are lucky enough to have such an example in the Soviet Union. I spent about six months living, traveling and doing business in Russia during the perestroika period and immediately afterward, and was fascinated by the transformation I witnessed.
The specifics are different, of course. The Soviet problems seem to have been largely organizational rather than physical in nature, although the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed just three years after reaching peak oil production is hardly a coincidence. The ultimate cause of the Soviet Union’s spontaneous collapse remains shrouded in mystery. Was it Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars? Or was it Raisa Gorbachev’s American Express card? It is possible to fake a missile defense shield; it is not so easy to fake a Harrods department store. The arguments go back and forth. One contemporary theory would have it that the Soviet elite scuttled the whole program when they decided that Soviet Socialism was not going to make them rich. (It remains unclear why it should have taken the Soviet elite 70 years to come to this startlingly obvious conclusion.)
A slightly more commonsense explanation is this: during the pre-perestroika “stagnation” period, due to the chronic underperformance of the economy, coupled with record levels of military expenditure, trade deficit and foreign debt, it became increasingly difficult for the average Russian middle-class family of three, with both parents working, to make ends meet. (Now, isn’t that beginning to sound familiar?) Of course, the government bureaucrats were not too concerned about the plight of the people. But the people found ways to survive by circumventing government controls in a myriad of ways, preventing the government from getting the results it needed to keep the system going. Therefore, the system had to be reformed. When this became the consensus view, reformers lined up to try and reform the system. Alas, the system could not be reformed. Instead of adapting, it fell apart.
Russia was able to bounce back economically because it remains fairly rich in oil and very rich in natural gas, and will probably continue in relative prosperity for at least a few more decades. In North America, on the other hand, oil production peaked in the early 1970s and has been in decline ever since, while natural gas production is now set to fall off a production cliff, notwithstanding the recent desperate and environmentally destructive use of “Fracking” to get at shale gas. Yet energy demand continues to rise far above what the continent can supply, making such a spontaneous recovery unlikely. When I say that Russia bounced back, I am not trying to understate the human cost of the Soviet collapse or the lopsidedness and the economic disparities of the reborn Russian economy. But I am suggesting that where Russia bounced back because it was not fully spent, the United States will be more fully spent and less capable of bouncing back.
But such “big picture” differences are not so interesting. It is the micro-scale similarities that offer interesting practical lessons on how small groups of individuals can successfully cope with economic and social collapse. And that is where the post-Soviet experience offers a multitude of useful lessons.
Back in the USSR
I first flew back to Leningrad, which was soon to be rechristened St. Petersburg, in the summer of 1989, about a year after Gorbachev freed the last batch of political prisoners, my uncle among them, who had been locked up by General Secretary Andropov’s final, senile attempt at clenching an iron fist. For the first time it became possible for Soviet escapees to go back and visit. More than a decade had passed since I left, but the place was much as I remembered it: bustling streets full of Volgas and Ladas, Communist slogans on the roofs of towering buildings lit up in neon, long lines in shops.
About the only thing new was a flurry of activity around a newly organized Cooperative movement. A newly hatched entrepreneurial class was busy complaining that their “cooperatives” were only allowed to sell to the government, at government prices, while they contrived ingenuous schemes to skim something off the top through barter arrangements. Most were going bankrupt. It did not turn out to be a successful business model for them or for the government, which was, as it turned out, also on its last legs.
I went back a year later and found a place I did not quite recognize. First of all, it smelled different: the smog was gone. The factories had largely shut down, there was very little traffic and the fresh air smelled wonderful! The shops were largely empty (in the sense of being quite uncontaminated by consumer goods) and often closed. There were very few gas stations open and the ones that were had lines that stretched for many blocks. There was a ten-liter limit on gasoline purchases.
Since there was nothing better for us to do, my friends and I decided to take a road trip to visit the medieval Russian cities of Pskov and Novgorod, taking in the surrounding countryside along the way. For this, we had to obtain fuel. It was hard to come by. It was available on the black market, but no one felt particularly inclined to let go of something so valuable in exchange for something so useless as money. Soviet money ceased to have value, since there was so little that could be bought with it, and people still felt skittish around foreign currency.
Luckily, there was a limited supply of another sort of currency available to us. It was close to the end of Gorbachev’s ill-fated anti-alcoholism campaign, during which vodka was rationed. There was a death in my family, for which we received a funeral’s worth of vodka coupons, which we of course redeemed right away. What was left of the vodka was placed in the trunk of the trusty old Lada, and off we went. Each half-liter bottle of vodka was exchanged for ten liters of gasoline, giving