Drifting Apart: Soviet Energy and the Cohesion of the Communist Bloc in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

The focus of this chapter is on multinational oil, gas, and electricity projects within CMEA that were initiated to satisfy the increasing energy needs of the socialist states in Eastern Europe but largely failed to do so because of a drop in Soviet energy deliveries during the 1980s. The Soviet Union started large-scale energy shipments to the fraternal states in socialist Eastern Europe in the early 1960s. Given the relative scarcity of energy resources in Eastern Europe, the dependency increased over the period from the early 1960s to the early 1980s to such a degree that the Soviet Union found it increasingly difficult to supply the quantities needed or even requested. The economic development, and by extension the internal social peace, of the Socialist countries of Eastern Europe depended on annually increasing Soviet energy deliveries. Subsidized Soviet supplies of energy to a certain degree formed the glue that kept the CMEA together. Once the Soviet capabilities of increasing energy deliveries had become exhausted in the early 1980s, the economic integration of the CMEA reversed itself until its collapse in 1991.