According to 1940 data from the newspaper Neftyanoye khozyaystvo [“The Oil Industry”], the results of the first years of the Third Five-Year Plan were as follows: “Over the last two to three years, the oil industry’s progress has slowed somewhat, and current rates of development, production, and refining are completely inadequate; in any event they do not correspond to the rich reserves present in oil production and refining. This slowing in the development of the oil industry has created a gap between the production of and demand for these products in the USSR economy. The rates of production adopted by the people’s commissar for the oil industry in the first quarter of 1940 are clearly insufficient, so much so that oil workers must not only fulfill, but exceed the plan for 1940.”
A significant reason for the industry slowdown was that, over the past three years, prospecting drilling decreased to a level that threatened further operational drilling. For example, whereas 437,000 feet of prospecting drilling was done and 153 wells were completed in 1936, the 1937 figures were, respectively, 207,677 feet and 50 wells; in 1938, they were 157,480 feet and 40 wells; and in 1939, they had fallen to 134,186 feet and 21 wells. A direct consequence of this was a sharp drop in oil production. In 1939, production from new wells significantly decreased in comparison with 1936, and did not make up for the decline in old wells. In 1940, 34.3 million tons of oil were produced, but the sale of all petroleum products in the USSR amounted to 27.6 million tons. The Plan non-fulfillment was thus 5.6 million tons of crude.
By 1940, Soviet oil exports had fallen 88.2% in comparison with 1932, to 522,000 tons of petroleum products and 269,000 tons of crude oil. Over the same years, kerosene exports fell by 93.5%, and gasoline exports by 94.2%.
In 1940, the Malgobek–Grozny oil pipeline (9.8 inches in diameter, 62 miles long) and Gora–Gorskaya oil pipeline (7.9 inches in diameter, 35 miles long) were built. In total, 355 miles of trunk oil and petroleum products pipelines were built and placed in service during the Third Five-Year Plan (1938–1941). The main goal of the economic and design studies carried out at that time to justify the choice of a pipeline network route was to improve the supply of crude oil and petroleum products to the eastern regions of the country.
By 1941, craelius core drilling had prepared more than 100 promising structures and prospecting drilling had discovered 14 oil fields, and so intensified and accelerated prospecting for new oil areas and increased drilling volume were set as the basic goal for the year. In terms of geologic petroleum reserves, the USSR was first in the world (5.2 billion tons), but in terms of production, the USSR lagged quite substantially behind the US (201.6 million tons in 1940).
In 1941, a large-scale program of economic construction and further enhancement of the country’s defensive capability was proposed in connection with the war in Europe, which had been going on for more than a year.
One of the pre-war characteristics of the USSR’s oil industry was its territorial arrangement. By the beginning of 1941, oil production and refining were concentrated in the southern regions of the USSR, on the Absheron Peninsula and in the North Caucasus, while the areas of the “Second Baku”—the Volga-Urals region—were producing around 2.2 million tons, which represented only 6% of total Soviet production.
The geographic distribution of the oil production and refining industry that emerged, with an inordinate concentration of production and large reserves of raw hydrocarbons in the south of the country, coupled with an underdeveloped pipeline and transportation infrastructure, created great difficulties in the delivery of oil from production points to regions where it was consumed, and proved to be one of the key factors behind the extraordinary complications faced by the Soviet Union in the organization of oil supply and production.
The Harsh Years of the Great Patriotic War
Early on the morning of June 22, 1941, German armed forces crossed the national border of the USSR without a declaration of war, and thus began World War II for the Russian people.48
What followed was the fiercest and bloodiest war the country has ever experienced. It forced its way into every home, every family, and into the heart of every person. It lasted 1,418 days, from June 22, 1941 through May 9, 1945. More than 27 million citizens of the Soviet Union gave up their lives for their country.
Adolf Hitler’s inhuman plans for conquest to achieve world domination were determined to a great extent by energy resources, and the oil factor had a substantial influence on the nature and course of the war. To a certain extent, the limited nature of fuel and energy reserves predetermined the strategy and tactics of Nazi Germany’s actions in theaters of military operations. As one European country after another fell to the Nazi regime, the Führer’s first order of business was to examine the conquered countries’ oil reserves.
In preparing for war, the Nazi leaders had bet on producing synthetic gasoline. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler issued several orders to expedite the construction of refineries to produce synthetic gasoline from coal. On the eve of military actions in Europe, Germany organized mass production of “synthetic” gasoline on the basis of the Fischer-Tropsch hydrogenation process, using hard coal and brown coal as raw material. With government support, the companies Ruhrchemie AG and Wirtschaftsgruppe Kraftindustrie built a wide network of hydrogenation plants, and from 1934 through 1938 the production of liquid motor fuel increased almost eightfold, reaching 1.7 million tons of synthetic gasoline. Although the production of such fuel was expensive, the Führer noted: “The German fuel industry must now develop with maximum speed... and cost is no object in obtaining raw materials.”49 German production of synthetic fuel continued to develop at a very rapid pace. At the time of the attack on Poland in September 1939, Germany was operating 14 hydrogenation enterprises, and by 1941 the number had risen to 22, with a total production capacity amounting to 6.7 million tons of synthetic fuel.
By June 1941, Nazi Germany controlled 93 refineries with a total capacity of 29.2 million tons in the annexed and occupied territories (Austria, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, and Norway). Wehrmacht forces seized more than 8.8 million tons of petroleum products as they occupied Europe. In 1941, Germany itself produced 1.72 million tons of oil. Romania, a German ally, possessed a significant oil area in the Ploiesti region, and before the attack on the USSR, the Romanian regime of Marshal Antonescu was supplying 58% of oil delivered to the Reich.
It should be noted that in the initial period of World War II, limited volumes of Soviet oil (only around 725,000 tons) were delivered to Germany only after August 1939, when Germany and the USSR signed a nonaggression pact, and they continued until June 22, 1941, i.e., for less than two years. Therefore, they could not have had any significant influence on the course of military operations.
Oil played a significant role in Hitler’s decision to attack the Soviet Union, and according to the testimony of Albert Speer, minister of armaments and war production, it was a prime motive. According to the Führer’s associates, he was always obsessed by the idea of seizing the oil in the Caucasus. This, he felt, would make his German Reich truly invincible.
But what determined Hitler’s eastern military strategy? He understood that moving westward would unavoidably lead to a confrontation with the US, the most powerful military force in the western world, while he considered the Soviet Union to have a weak economy and military. Military intelligence reports available to German headquarters said that German troops would enter Russia “like a knife through butter.” Hitler called the USSR “a giant on clay legs,” which would crumble at the first blow. Operation Barbarossa was to be another exercise in blitzkrieg warfare, which had already brought success in the defeat of Poland, France, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece.