European Comecon Members in Search of Oil Shortage Solutions: The Establishment of the Petroleum Bureau in 1973

Abstract

This article examines attempts at multilateral cooperation between the USSR and European Comecon members which experienced a shortage of primary energy resources, in the acquisition and transportation of large volumes of oil from the developing world in the early 1970s. The paper focuses on the creation of the so-called Bureau of Petroleum, a new Comecon working body as part of the Standing Commission on Foreign Trade. This Bureau carried out its activities, which were of a closed nature, in 1973–1978. The Petroleum Bureau was created to fulfill the functions of an effective focal point of the Comecon member countries interested in jointly solving the problems of increasing oil imports from developing countries and expanding economic and technical cooperation with said countries. This is the first study dedicated to the causes and the process of creating the Bureau of Petroleum. It is based on documents of the XXV and XXVI sessions of the CMEA, the CMEA Executive Committee, the CMEA Standing Commission on Foreign Trade, as well as other materials from the CMEA fund in the Russian State Archive of Economics (RGAE). The author concludes that the creation of the Petroleum Bureau was associated with the shortage of oil at the beginning of the 1970s in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the nationalisation of Iraq’s oil industry adopted by the Baathist government on 1 June 1972.