2026/07/21 by Beatrice Penati, Beatrice Pénati
Energy · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Global Energy Security and Policy #Belt and Road Initiative #Balkans: History, Politics, Society
paper · doi:10.1093/ehr/ceag152
The question of the interdependence between Europe and Russia in the field of oil and gas is highly topical. Jeronim Perović offers here a comprehensive and agile reconstruction of how such interdependence came about, by examining the history of Russia’s oil and gas extraction, transportation and trade since 1917. By considering the interplay between economic arguments, great-power strategy and ideology, he explains why Moscow came to accept its own dependence on this trade, despite its opposition to the capitalist system and competition with the West. This leads him to criticise accounts of the Cold War that have minimised economic factors and the USSR’s involvement in international trade, echoing previous contributions by Per Högselius (Red Gas, 2013) and Oscar Sanchez-Sibony (Red Globalization, 2014). The author also considers ‘why some projects came to fruition’ instead of others, to conclude that ‘sober cost-benefit calculations’ mattered more than ‘any geopolitical grand design’ (p. 7). ‘Political considerations’, though, were always part of the equation, and they prevailed over economic reasoning in 2022 (pp. 208–9).