How Oil Ate the Soviet Economy

The Asianometry Podcast

In 1979, the Soviet Union was the world's leading producer of oil, pumping 11.5 million barrels of oil each day.

At the end of our last video on this, the Soviet Union finished the 1960s as the second biggest oil producing nation in the world.

Even so, the country's most plentiful bounties of oil and natural gas were still yet to come, hiding beneath Siberia's frozen swamps and lakes.

In this video, we look at how the Soviet Union became an energy superpower and how that contributed to the country's eventual dissolution.