Russia is a huge storehouse of natural resources, including oil, gas, and other energy sources, which she can trade with the rest of the world for advanced technology and wheat. In this book, leading experts evaluate the Soviet potential in major energy and industrial raw materials, giving special attention to implications for the world economy to the end of the twentieth century. The authors examine the mineral and forest resources that the Soviet Union has developed and may yet develop to provide exports during the 1980s. They discuss the regional dimension of these resources, especially in Siberia and the Soviet Far East; individual mineral raw materials, such as petroleum, natural gas, timber, iron ore, manganese, and gold; and finally the role of raw materials in Soviet foreign trade. The authors, representing the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, are primarily geographers, but they include economists, political scientists, and a geologist. Their work is based on primary sources (for most of these reports, current information is no longer being released to researchers) and on interviews with Soviet officials.

The Soviet Far East (1990) examines the largest economic region in the Soviet Union, the Far East. The region is explored in all its geographical and economic complexity. Chapters on the state of its development under Gorbachev (and his programme of investment) are supplemented by examinations of the history of its settlement, analysis of its unique environment and the threats which economic growth might pose for it, and of the region’s vital strategic significance to the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Economy (1983) examines the long-term prospective growth of the USSR’s economy. It looks at the Soviet economy’s growth process at an advanced stage of development, and assesses how it would evolve in the period ahead. Various growth plans had made large advances to the state-planned economy, but by the 1980s this growth had slowed.

One of the most significant resource-development and industrial-policy issues facing the United States today is the continued decline of domestic production and processing of metallic minerals and the associated dependence on foreign supplies for our needs. Domestic mining and processing industries have suffered from various economic problems and i

First published in 1987, Siberia examines the developments in the different sectors of Siberian economy and discusses the role of this vast and little-known region in the Soviet Union’s overall economic and defence strategy. It surveys historical developments and the geography of the region and focuses on the key problem areas such as manpower shortage, the difficulties involved in exploiting the territory’s natural resources, internal communications – including the construction of the Baikal-Amur Railway in the Far East- and considers Siberia’s place in the context of international relations and the world economy. This book is a must read for scholars of Russian history, Russian geopolitics, European politics, international relations and European history.

This book argues that the Soviet Union was a highly influential actor in furthering understandings of society-nature interaction on the international stage and played a key role in helping to shape, conceptualize and assess the relationship between humankind and the Earth system. It considers how humankind’s capacity to affect physical and biological systems at a global scale was acknowledged and studied by Soviet scientists, discusses how the interaction between Soviet and Western scientists stimulated the development of new technologies and insights, which simultaneously facilitated a more profound understanding of the Earth’s physical and biological systems, and explores how Soviet scientists drew upon pre-revolutionary intellectual traditions in order to make sense of society-nature interaction and did so in collaboration with a range of international initiatives. Overall, the book provides a deep analysis of how Soviet scientists conceptualized society-nature interaction and influenced the understanding of global physical and biological systems. Furthermore, it is argued that this intellectual legacy remains of importance today with respect to the activities of Russian science and contemporary global environmental challenges.

A 1989 collection of ten essays, originally published in 1989, by leading scholars of the time, written from an economic standpoint.

In this empirically based study, ZumBrunnen and Osleeb present a current, comprehensive, and in-depth view of Soviet heavy industry capacity and suggest that significant changes in production locations and manufacturing efficiency levels are warranted. Using a mathematical model to analyze the optimal locations for Soviet iron and steel production, they predict probable shifts in industry locations, output, and processes at both existing locations and future centers up to the year 1990.

Urban areas in Arctic Russia are experiencing unprecedented social and ecological change. This collection outlines the key challenges that city managers will face in navigating this shifting political, economic, social, and environmental terrain. In particular, the volume examines how energy production drives a boom-bust cycle in the Arctic economy, explores how migrants from Muslim cultures are reshaping the social fabric of northern cities, and provides a detailed analysis of climate change and its impact on urban and industrial infrastructure.