Petroleum production, consumption, and export in the USSR: New estimates, 1865--1997

This study estimates Russian/Soviet petroleum production from the first oil discoveries in tsarist Russia in the early 1860s through the years of the post-Soviet transition. I roughly estimate that at the current production level, Russia's remaining oil reserves would be exhausted in 15--45 years.;I also model the demand for Soviet oil in Eastern and Western European markets and utilize these results to evaluate whether the USSR provided subsidies to its Eastern European partners via discounted oil prices. The results show that subsidization began in mid-1960s, a decade before the first oil price shock, and significantly increased until the collapse of the Socialist Bloc in late 1980s.;I also test the hypothesis that energy exports played a balancing role for the Soviet hard-currency current account via redirection of sales from socialist to western markets. I find that petroleum exports appear to balance both soft- and hard-currency accounts simultaneously, without export redirection.