L. Fituni, I. Abramova Resource Potential of Africa and Russia's ...

still one more uniting feature – both failed (at least as yet), to translate
this conceptual assumption into life. In the view of the others,
there are lots of cultural and psychological similarities between the
peoples of both areas in relation to their natural wealth. But these
subjective subjects lie beyond the scope of this research.
Speaking about dissimilarities, the first and most obvious one
that comes to minds is, of course, the disparity in the levels of socioeconomic
development of the former second global superpower and
the world’s poorest region. That would include differences in dozens
of specific areas: incomes, health, education, cultural environment,
history etc. Acknowledging all that, we still believe that the comparative
analysis undertaken below is not only legitimate methodologically
but useful practically.
From the point of view of political economy and geopolitics, the
fundamental similarity of the African and Russian developmental
paradigms lies with the fact that their natural resources are primarily
used as sources of financial revenues. The proceeds from exploitation
thereof are crucial for sustaining national statehoods, livelihoods,
and to a certain extent for their economic progress. The domestic
productive employment of the produce of their extractive
industries for final consumption is very limited. Gone are the days,
when the Soviet Union enjoyed the status of a self-sufficient economic
giant, capable not only of extracting various mineral products
from its soil, but also efficiently processing them to construct state
of the art machinery, spacecrafts, and high-tech equipment.
The winners in the Cold War assigned Russia a distinct subordinated
place in the global division of labor. Already heavily dependent
on the oil and gas exports, having lost its superpower status, the
democratized Russian Federation had to surrender its traditional
markets (former Soviet republics and socialist states of Eastern
Europe and Asia and the Third World) of its manufacturing industries
to competitions. Moscow was stripped of its geopolitical zones
of interests (which were its guaranteed markets), and with them
separated from many buyers of its military hardware and high tech
produce. Since 1991 Russia if confined nearly exclusively to the role
of a supplier of raw materials, primarily oil and gas. This is the posi-
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