Harold James is professor of European Studies at Princeton. Brendan Greeley is a PhD student there and a former FT Alphaville writer. Here they look to history to explain Russia’s gold fetishism, and to the nature of money to explain why that fetish will fail to deliver on its promise.
Putin’s war on Ukraine rested on two premises: that a massive show of force would demoralise Kyiv; and that Russia’s $630bn in financial reserves would deter anyone who might question the value of the rouble. But both premises evaporated, because they depended on decisions that were beyond Putin’s control: whether Ukrainians would flee before a column of tanks, and whether the world would continue to grant Russia the privilege of money. Never has money appeared more political.
Like Macbeth, Putin thought that his castle’s strength would laugh a siege to scorn. But money is not like a castle in one important way: it only works when everyone else agrees that you can use it. There was nothing intrinsic about the value of Russia’s reserves, even the $142bn in gold held in Russia itself. They only had value when they were still tied into the global financial system.