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Russia’s role in global energy history is the subject of this book. While this study takes a longitudinal view—from Lenin to Putin—the focus is on the Soviet Union during the Cold War, especially the period from the mid-1950s until the early 1980s. Russia had been engaged in the trade of oil since the late nineteenth century, but the rise of oil—and later also natural gas—to a dominant position in the Soviet trade structure heralded a new chapter in the country’s global economic entanglement. It was during Leonid Brezhnev’s tenure as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) that key decisions were made to tap into Western Siberia’s vast natural resources and expand the shipment of oil—and later also gas—to a previously unprecedented scale through a dense transnational network of pipelines. Energy became the glue that held the Soviet-dominated Eastern European socialist bloc together, fostering mutual dependencies and shaping relations that would persist even after the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Through the conclusion of long-term economic agreements with selected Western European countries, the Soviet Union rose to become Europe’s single most important trading partner in the sphere of oil and gas, essentially breaking its longstanding rule of modernizing and developing its economy, if not in isolation, then as independently as possible from the capitalist-dominated world economy. The Soviet Union thus abandoned autarky in favor of economic integration and exchange across the Iron Curtain, paving the way for the kind of energy interdependencies that continue to shape economic relations between Russia and Europe to this day. The book manuscript has been completed and accepted for review by Cambridge University Press.
(Von Jeronim Perović, erschienen am 7. März 2022 im Böhlau-Verlag (Wien, Köln)
Russlands Aufstieg zur modernen Grossmacht war wesentlich mit der Fähigkeit des Landes verbunden, sein enormes Ressourcenpotential zu nutzen. Die Entwicklung der russischen Energiewirtschaft verlief in den letzten einhundert Jahren parallel zu einer immer engeren Verflechtung mit der Welt, und insbesondere mit Europa, dem wichtigsten Absatzmarkt für russische Rohstoffe. Mit der Steigerung der Energieproduktion und der Ausweitung des internationalen Handels begab sich Russland aber auch in grenzüberschreitende Abhängigkeiten. Dieses Buch zeigt auf, dass Energie die Dynamik der Ost-West-Beziehungen weit stärker beeinflusst hat, als die bisherige Forschung dies vermuten lässt. Es war im Bereich des Handels mit Öl und Gas, wo sogar zur Zeit des Kalten Krieges und über den Eisernen Vorhang hinweg Zusammenarbeit möglich war. Die Energiegeschichte und die Geschichte des Aussenhandels treten in den gängigen Darstellungen zur russischen Geschichte meist als Nebenschauplätze in Erscheinung. Dieses Buch rückt sie in den Mittelpunkt der Erzählung. Denn der Umgang Russlands mit seinem Rohstoffreichtum ist zentral, um den Entwicklungsweg des Landes und sein Verhalten in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart zu verstehen.
(hrsg. von Peter Collmer, Ekaterina Emeliantseva Koller und Jeronim Perović, erschienen im November 2019 im Böhlau-Verlag (Wien, Weimar, Köln).
(Von Jeronim Perović, erschienen im Juni 2018 bei Hurst Publishers (London) und Oxford University Press (New York)
This book is about a region on the fringes of empire, which neither Tsarist Russia, nor the Soviet Union, nor in fact the Russian Federation, ever really managed to control. Starting with the nineteenth century, it analyses the state’s various strategies to establish its rule over populations highly resilient to change imposed from outside, who frequently resorted to arms to resist interference in their religious practices and beliefs, traditional customs, and ways of life. Jeronim Perovic offers a major contribution to our knowledge of the early Soviet era, a crucial yet overlooked period in this region’s troubled history. During the 1920s and 1930s, the various peoples of this predominantly Muslim region came into contact for the first time with a modernising state, demanding not only unconditional loyalty but active participation in the project of ‘socialist transformation’. Drawing on unpublished documents from Russian archives, Perovic investigates the changes wrought by Russian policy and explains why, from Moscow’s perspective, these modernisation attempts failed, ultimately prompting the Stalinist leadership to forcefully exile the Chechens and other North Caucasians to Central Asia in 1943-4.
(Sammelband hrsg. von Jeronim Perović, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
Energy dimensions of the Cold War in general, and the role of Soviet oil and gas in particular, remain still largely under-researched topics in the historiography. While Western studies on the Cold War tend to leave oil and gas out of the picture, the few publications on the history of oil and gas do not generally interlace their analyzes with the history of the Cold War. There is still very little research based on newly available Soviet archival material on issues such as Soviet strategic thinking with regard to the development of its oil and gas sector, the establishment of energy relations within the Soviet controlled Eastern European ‘bloc’, or the various meanings that Soviet leaders attached to energy as a factor in relations to Western Europe, the US, and the countries of the Third World. By bringing together historians and specialists from the United States, Europe and Russia, this book represents a pioneering endeavor to approach these issues in a comprehensive manner and put them into transnational perspective.
