ABSTRACT
The role that western Siberia’s vast oil resources will play in the development of Russia, Siberia, the Far East, and the Northeast Asian region puzzles Russian policy makers as well as analysts of Russian affairs. Unquestionably, Siberia’s oil and gas deposits are world class in size; they powered Soviet postwar economic expansion and provided much-needed hard currency for Soviet purchases of Western agricultural and manufactured goods. Since 1988, however, the Soviet (and then Russian) government’s budget could no longer sustain the enormous investment required to keep the fields producing. Furthermore, local governmental bodies in western Siberia increasingly demanded the authority to direct investment and tax oil and gas production associations, at Moscow’s expense.
