Explained: What is the 30-year-old ‘golden billion’ conspiracy theory invoked by Russian President Vladimir Putin?

“Why should they be able to dominate the world and impose its own rules of behaviour?” Putin was reported to have asked. He also made a reference to India, saying the golden billion were able to achieve global dominance “to a large extent…by robbing other peoples: in Asia, and in Africa”, and “Look at how India has been plundered!”

The theory of the so-called golden billion (‘zolotoi milliard’ in Russian) has been around for 30 years, and accuses wealthy Western elites of having amassed wealth by exploiting the rest of the world, and of seeking to perpetuate their total control over the planet’s limited resources.

Genesis of the theory

“Golden billion” was coined as the USSR stood at the cusp of collapse, by a Russian named Anatoly K Tsikunov, in a book titled ‘The Plot of World Government: Russia and the golden billion’, which he wrote in 1990 under the pseudonym A. Kuzmich.

The book described a doomsday scenario in which powerful Western nations deeply fearful of global overpopulation, ecological change, and the lack of sufficient resources, would seek to extend control over the rest of the world, and ensure that it is habitable to only a billion of their own people.

Russia in particular, the theory had it, would be at the receiving end of this Western-led plan, because its natural resources and large land mass would be necessary for the survival of this billion-strong elite, The Washington Post said in an article on Putin’s speech and the golden billion theory.

Kuzmich’s ideas were popularised by the anti-Western and anti-globalisation Soviet-era intellectual Sergei Kara-Murz. In an article written in 1999, Kara-Murz argued that while the elites in these rich Western countries do not refer to themselves as the golden billion, the theory emerged from a combination of two major Western ideas: one, of a “golden age” of prosperity and progress, and two, the view that the world’s limited resources would not be able to sustain its entire population.

He argued that the golden billion had come to connote in practical terms the population of the high-income Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries that have higher levels of per capita consumption than the developing world.

Theory in Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric

The Washington Post article quoted from a 2019 book by Eliot Borenstein, a professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University: “The golden billion gathers together many of the most important tropes of benighted, post-Soviet Russia — the need to defend the country’s natural resources from a rapacious West, the West’s demoralisation of Russia’s youth, destruction of Russia’s economy, and destruction of public health — into one compelling narrative.”

The theory, Borenstein wrote, “has become a staple of contemporary Russian conspiratorial thought” (‘Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy After Socialism’, Cornell University Press, 2019).

Putin has himself invoked the theory earlier. In the 2002 book ‘First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’ (English translation, 2000), which brings together six interviews of the Russian President, he says that only “a small number of states, populated by the so-called golden billion” have been able to achieve economic and scientific progress in the past two to three decades.

After the West sanctioned Russia to punish it for invading Ukraine, Russian officials have sought to use the theory as proof of the attempt to isolate Moscow. Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of Russia’s Security Council, said: “While hiding their actions behind the human rights, freedom and democracy rhetoric, they push ahead with the ‘golden billion’ doctrine, which implies that only a select few are entitled to prosperity in this world,” TASS reported.

The Washington Post report quoted from an interview given by Patruschev to the state-owned Russian language publication Argumenty i Fakty, in which the official, who is seen by some as a potential successor to Putin, suggested that the Covid-19 pandemic could have been orchestrated by the West in pursuit of its golden billion project.

Xenia Cherkaev, an anthropologist at HSE University in Russia said in a 2022 paper titled ‘The Golden Billion: Russia, COVID, Murderous Global Elites’ that the theory “is becoming increasingly commonsensical in late-liberal Russia”. Cherkaev pointed out that the golden billion is not only used to criticise the West but the Kremlin as well, considered by some Russians to be controlled by the global elite.