Fuel and Power: Energy, Trade, and Russian Foreign Relations from Lenin to Putin by JeronimPerović. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. xvi + 250 pp. $34.99 (paper). ISBN 978‐1‐0094‐4914‐4

The Russian Federation’s second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 displayed once again the relationship between Russian power and hydrocarbons. In Fuel and Power, historian Jeronim Perović provides a sweeping and fast-paced survey of Russia’s reliance on fossil fuels to project power from the early Soviet period to the present day. Drawing on his command of the secondary literature and documents from Russian archives, he contends that “Russia’s behaviour, both past and present, cannot be adequately understood without considering the energy factor, and the aim of this book is to uncover the manifold links between resources wealth and policy choices” (p. 9). Given the extent to which scholarship on Soviet foreign relations and the Cold War more broadly tends to downplay economic factors and motivations, Fuel and Power is a welcome and timely contribution to the literature. The narrative begins with the Bolshevik conquest of the Caucuses, the heart of the tsarist Russian oil industry, in the early 1920s. The Bolsheviks nationalized private holdings and expelled the foreign companies. Lacking the tools and technical knowledge to restore production, however, the Bolsheviks soon offered concessions to reattract foreign companies. With foreign assistance, oil exports helped Moscow break out of political and economic international isolation after the Civil War and even led to murmurs in Europe that “red oil” could “displace Western international companies” (p. 59). The events of the 1930s dashed those fears as Soviet exports began to disappear from the market because of the collapse of commodity prices amid the Great Depression and widespread fears of global shortages encouraged the Soviets to hoard their supplies. Although Nazi Germany failed to capture the Caucasian oil fields during the Second World War, the war disrupted production so much that the Soviet Union would become a net oil (as well as coal) importer until the mid-1950s. With Baku recovered and Soviet investment in the Volga-Ural region bearing fruit by the late 1950s, the Soviet Union flooded European markets with oil during the 1960s. Fuel and Power excels in its treatment of the Cold War’s second half. The 1970s marked an inflection point in the Soviet Union’s relationship with global capitalism. The Soviet Union rose to become the world’s largest oil producer by the middle of the decade, and new gas deals with Western European countries brought the Cold War adversaries into a tight economic embrace. The Soviet Union grew more dependent on income from its oil and gas income, and “never in its history was the Soviet Union more integrated into world trade and more dependent on raw material exports than in the first half of the 1980s” (p. 162). The countershock of the mid-1980s thus pummeled the Soviet economy. Perović skillfully rejects the argument that the collapse of oil prices caused the disintegration of the Soviet Union five years later and persuasively contends that it “revealed flaws in an economic system that was increasingly subsidized by export revenues and was already in profound crisis” (p. 166). Although Perović provides extensive evidence that the development of the Soviet oil industry converged with changes in global capitalism, he also demonstrates that Soviet energy served as the lifeblood of the Soviet bloc for most of its lifespan. Indeed, there may have been a missed opportunity for the author to comment on Soviet energy’s importance for global socialism as well as global capitalism. Economic explanations for Soviet behavior predominate and the geopolitical stakes occasionally disappear from the narrative (the crisis over the Siberian pipeline in the early 1980s, for example), and greater attention to the strategic implications of the new relationship to the capitalist world would have enhanced the argument. After the chaos of the 1990s, the Russian oil industry recovered in the 2000s in no small part because of the oil price spike on the world market. Not only did windfall of hard currency empower Vladimir Putin, Perović shows, but the state used its power to reassert control, formally and informally, over the oil and gas industries, partially pushing out foreign companies and using “national champions” such as Rosneft and Gazprom to advance the Kremlin’s interests. “Tsar Alexander is alleged to have said that Russia has only two allies: its army and its navy,” Perović writes; “Looking back on Putin’s first two terms as president, one might similarly conclude that oil and gas were the Russian state’s best friends” (p. 200). The book concludes with a short chapter that brings the story to the present day, one of the key additions to this English edition of his German-language Rohstoffmacht Russland (2022). The Russian war machine and domestic economy continue to rely on income from energy exports. Fuel and Power places recent events in perspective and offers readers one of the best single-volume treatments of Russia’s fossil fuels and its impact on the Kremlin’s ability to project power.