THE “DRUZHBA” TRUNK OIL PIPELINE AS A FACTOR OF SOVIET POLICY (1958–1974)

The article is devoted to the history of the energy and technological interaction of member countries the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. Using the example of the one of the largest infrastructure projects within the Comecon framework — the construction of the world’s longest Druzhba pipeline, which united the fuel and energy systems of the USSR, Poland, GDR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia — it shows the importance of cooperation between European socialist countries for the development of the fuel and energy complex and the chemical industry, as well as the economies of the countries of people’s democracy in general. At the initial stage, the project for the construction of the Druzhba pipeline was not considered a “political initiative” by either the top USSR political leadership or the leadership of the “economic bloc” of the Soviet Union. There is no reason to assert that the decision to begin construction of the pipeline was made by the USSR leadership, taking account of the fact that increasing oil exports to the countries of people’s democracy would serve as support for a foreign policy course aimed at strengthening the influence of the USSR in socialist countries. On the contrary, when implementing this infrastructure project, the USSR was guided by “economic logic” and proceeded from the urgent need of the European socialist countries to increase Soviet oil supplies. At the second stage, in the second half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, the intensification of fuel and energy cooperation in the countries of people’s democracy became part of the USSR’s extensive plans to reform the CMEA in order to create unified national economic plans and form a global socialist system of division of labor.