By energy crisis we understand a long-term set of interconnected and interdependent phenomena. It was most vividly manifested in 1973-4 and 1978-80, when two things occurred: shortage of oil supply and an explosive rise of oil prices in the world capitalist market. At the same time, shortage of a commodity in the market and the rise of its price is not called crisis by Marxists. Marxist science started to make use of the term ‘energy crisis’, originated in the West, applying it to one of the structural crises of contem­ porary capitalism, which began at the turn of the 1970s, alongside the financial and food crises.