Russia’s Fight For Oil

Northern Advocate, 29 May 1940, Page 10

Russia’s Fight For Oil

LONDON, April 6. “Fuel ,and transport are the measure of Russia’s economic capacity to supply Germany,” declares the special correspondent of the “Manchester Guardian,” explaining Germany’s frantic efforts to get more Rumanian oil.

The Soviet output of 30,500,000 tons of oil in 1937 was only 65 per cent of the estimate for that year under the second Five-Year Plan, with domestic demand always exceeding output. Russia’s agricultural programme concentrated on the mass production of oil-driven tractors to compensate for the catastrophe and insensate killing of horses by irate peasants in 1929. The Agricultural Commissar, M. Kaganovich, has summed up the problem as follows: “Without oil we cannot have tractors and no tractors means no grain or cotton.” Clamour Increased. Since then the growing automobile and aircraft industries of Russia have swelled the clamour for oil. In 1931, when the Soviet was shipping every spare gallon of oil abroad to create credits for the import of urgently needed machinery, the output of oil touched 5.224,302 tons. Yet it receded to 1,200,000 tons in 1933.

Though they constitute only 29 per cent of the Soviet oil reserves, the Baku fields, located a relative stone’s throw from the Turkish frontier, supply 70 per cent of the Russian output. Even if the so-called second Baku oilfields, centred in the Ishimbaeva and Perm areas, achieve the third Five Year Plan’s contribution of 7,000,000 tons out of ,a total hoped for production of 54,000,000 tons, the industry will remain dangerously topheavy. It is a question of even then it will do more than meet internal requirements. A Stumbling Block. Behind all the Soviet anxiety over its oil output remains the problem of | the serious state of the transport system, which was described by Stalin in 1934 as “a stumbling block to the whole economic system.”