ABSTRACT
The voluntary integration of Soviet oil production into the world market was fundamental for the industrialization of the Soviet Union from the beginning. It developed throughout the successive Five-Year Plans to become largely irreversible in the early 1970s and intensified further throughout the next two decades. The mixture of vast resources, a rigid domestic economic system, and a global oil crisis that quadrupled oil prices almost overnight transformed the Soviet Union from a relatively advanced industrial economy, potentially equal in its industrial capacity to the industrialized West, into a resource-exporting, peripheral dependency, such that, by the middle 1980s, the US administration could debilitate the Soviet economy by persuading Saudi Arabia to flood the oil market, sinking together world oil prices and Soviet external revenues.1 The windfall from the oil crises of the 1970s may have postponed the collapse of the Soviet economy till 1991, only to reveal, however, the extent to which its development, or perhaps survival, had become dependent on revenues from oil (and gas) exports.
