#21 Sergey Radchenko: How Russia Weaponized Energy (Even Before Putin)

Everyone thinks Putin perfected the energy weapon. But Russia has been using oil and gas as a political bludgeon for over 70 years — and it didn't start with him. Historian Sergey Radchenko traces the full arc of Russian energy coercion, from Stalin's colonial resource extraction in Eastern Europe to the Nord Stream bets that reshaped modern Europe — and makes the provocative case that the weapon has been failing for decades. How does a country turn oil and gas into a political weapon — and why has it kept backfiring? In this episode, I sit down with historian Sergey Radchenko, one of the world's leading experts on Soviet and post-Soviet diplomacy, to trace Russia's use of energy as an instrument of political power. The story begins not with the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but with Stalin treating Eastern Europe as a colonial resource colony in the late 1940s. It runs through Khrushchev's subsidized-energy trap, the 1973 oil shock, the Cold War pipeline battles, Yeltsin's gas wars with Ukraine, and Merkel's fateful Nord Stream bet. Radchenko makes a provocative case: Russia's energy weapon has been failing for decades — and may now be creating a dependence that runs in the opposite direction.