"This book examines the role
of Russia's energy resources in shaping not only its policy, polity and political processes, but its social identity
and worldview, thereby exerting critical influence over Russia's relations with the rest of the world. The main
thread running through the book is that 'geography has played a significant role in framing
how the country has been governed -and it continues to do so' (Chapter 1) in that 'geographical
space [is seen] as controllable flows of resources, not as a territory of communities' (Chapter 2). Russia
has been historically dependent on natural rather than human resources, with the vastness of Russia's
natural wealth located in its periphery, away from its urban centres. A spatiality and
materiality approach thus argues that the natural and human resources of Russia are detached from one
another, and that this detachment shapes Russia's polity, understood as broad territorial
governance."

-- Diana Bozhilova, Europe-Asia Studies (2021)

"It is also possible that resources,
and the wealth, power, and security they support, mitigate some of contemporary
Russia's worst tendencies. One can imagine that a federal state deprived of
resource revenues and lacking physical infrastructure with centralizing effects
would become more, not less authoritarian, and bellicose internationally."

-- Boris Barkanov, The Russian Review (2021)