ABSTRACT
This chapter examines controversy in which a number of participants had taken up a variety of positions on the issue of the West Siberian energy development. Naturally, the pro-West Siberians had tended to emphasize the richness of West Siberian seams and the low cost of extracting oil and gas there. There were a number of similar claims made by the pro-West Siberian figures. In retrospect, the pro-West Siberian claims in the early 1970s seem to have been much exaggerated. The pro-West Siberians had been more or less reticent about identifying who the pessimists were, and in which institutions they worked. The two Siberian geologists, Salmanov and Nesterov, having implied that the geologists' prognoses proved to be more realistic, complained that planning organs, however, had turned a deaf ear to them and only listened to other opinions. In the 1960s and the early 1970s, the pro-West Siberians were also busy stressing the cheapness of West Siberian oil and gas.
