Karl Marx wrote that “history repeats itself twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce.” The collapse of the Soviet Union was not a tragedy, nor is what is happening in Russia now a farce. Still, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a

At issue is the collapse of oil prices. Before the long decline in energy prices, oil and natural gas accounted for about 60 percent of Russia’s exports and 30 percent of its gross domestic product.

At the time, Russia was a Third World country trying to sustain a First World military. I call Russia Third World because for Vladimir Lenin, the countries that survived by selling raw materials to more advanced countries were the prisoners of imperialism, and later came to be called Third World. To Lenin, the fact that Russia generated a third of its GDP, as well as the majority of its national budget, from energy sales to industrialized countries makes it a classic Third World country.

The problem of these countries, according to Lenin, was that their survival depended on prices they could not control. Since the price of commodities is inherently volatile, determined as it is by the robustness of industrial powers, the exporter can neither control the price nor have an opportunity to generate investment capital on a systematic basis.

Whereas Marx gave little thought to Russia, which he considered hopelessly backward, Lenin obsessed over it. The entire point of Stalinism was to industrialize Russia through the ruthless confiscation of raw materials in order to raise capital for industrialization.

More than 100 years ago, Lenin staged the Bolshevik Revolution to move Russia beyond dependence on raw material sales. About 90 years ago, Stalin savaged Russian society in order to fulfill Lenin’s dream. Both failed to build a modern Russia.

A country that depends so heavily on any one commodity will always be vulnerable to imperial powers. There was a time when Russia could use energy sales — or energy embargoes, as the case may be — to make Europe tremble. But now the world is awash in energy, and despite Russia’s recent efforts to reach an entente with the Saudis — the epitome of the Third World energy exporter — it has failed to maintain prices. The Russians have floated conspiracy theories of U.S. and Saudi collaboration designed to cripple the Russian economy with low energy prices and few markets, but that assumes that any conspiracy would need to