Here it is, the price of your superpower: 30 dollars.

Thirty dollars for a barrel of oil. Oil fell to thirty, and everything collapsed. The government doesn't know how to pay state employees, regions have resorted to improvisation—and we're lucky it's not outright lawlessness yet. Deputies are left slack-jawed and drooling, while the president can only say one thing: that everything is right and good, that everything is good and right, and that everything is going exactly as planned.

Thirty dollars—the price of playing at Industrial Revival, Rising from Our Knees, the Return of the Empire, the Russian World, and Geopolitics. Suddenly, it turns out that nothing has been revived, no one has risen from their knees, and the Russian World doesn't even extend to Chechnya, where people can be trained with shepherd dogs and made to run on a treadmill without pants. Nor to Moscow, where such things are considered in tune with the spirit of the times.

It turns out there was nothing but outrageously expensive oil. Nothing but the mad money feverishly stuffed into the state's leaky pockets. Money not earned, money obtained without sweat, and with little blood—just the blood of random people pushed away from wells and valves by other random people.

Of course, we missed the empire. Of course, we longed for greatness. Since the West couldn't love us, we wanted it to at least fear us, as before. Inside our country, we remained powerless and insignificant ants, but we needed to at least be proud of our anthill.

And we were taught to be proud of this anthill again. Proud of how majestically it swarms, how uncontrollably it grows, how greedily it digs into the earth beneath it, and how inexorably it encroaches on the surrounding ecosystem. For such a thing, what ant wouldn't be ready to be crushed? Perhaps only the most unpatriotic ant.

On television, we had everything: ultra-modern weapons and a combat-ready army, spruced-up workers in the workshops of reviving giant factories, a polished Caucasus, bright little houses for the military, a capital dressed in granite, the respect of world leaders, and the condescending smile of the President, gazing down from the height of a crane's flight at all this burgeoning splendor.

Those born close to the National Leader were useful for something important. To imitate the Resurrection of the Superpower with a trillion random heavenly dollars. In the well-known way: by inflating the budget tenfold.

They were lucky, of course, but everyone was lucky. Everyone got a kopeck from the tsar. Pensioners, policemen, doctors, and even hipsters in skinny jeans.

Everyone got a little from the oil money and generously from the oil intoxication. Some believed it would now be like the Soviet Union. Others—that it would be like Europe.

We always compared ourselves to the USA: we didn't want, they say, to be a noble lady, but desired to be the second pole of power and might on Earth, and immediately! Did you hear? Im-me-di-ate-ly!

But then came thirty dollars a barrel. And at this point, it became clear who we had been all this time. A banana republic. A regional player that accidentally got rich on resources. A local authority that rose up.

We shouldn't have compared ourselves to Obama, but to other similarly oil-sated regional "respectable people." To Saudi Arabia, spending billions on Wahhabism, to Venezuela and its global Bolivarianism, to Kazakhstan and its unique path. Here, here is Russia with its Russian World and the Resurrection of the Empire. Take off your pants—and onto the treadmill, treading in place while civilization speeds toward the horizon.