Development in the oil and gas sector

In the 1930s in the USSR, a targeted search for gas fields began. In 1935, the first purely gas field in the USSR, the Sedyelskoye field, was discovered in the Komi ASSR not far from Ukhta. By the end of the 1930s, more than 50 natural gas fields had been discovered in Azerbaijan, the Volga region, the North Caucasus, and Central Asia. Over the following two decades, large gas fields were discovered in the Saratov and Tyumen regions, Stavropol and Krasnodar territories, and in the Ukrainian SSR. In 1946, the first trunk gas pipeline, Saratov – Moscow, was commissioned. In the 1960s, new large fields appeared on the country's gas map — the Urengoy, Medvezhye, and Yamburg fields in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug in the RSFSR. In 1984, the Soviet Union took first place in gas production.

In 1970, the "deal of the century" was signed — the gas-for-pipes contract between the USSR and the FRG, which made it possible in 1973 to begin deliveries of gas from the USSR to Europe via the built gas pipeline. In the times of the USSR, the Bratstvo, Soyuz, and Progress gas pipelines were built for the delivery of gas to Eastern Europe.

Oil production developed actively. The Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug (at that time — the Tyumen region) in Western Siberia became the main oil-producing region of the USSR; it was there that in 1965 the Samotlor oil field, the largest in the country, was discovered.

In 1964, the first export oil pipeline, which bore the name Druzhba, was put into operation. Along it, oil from the Volga-Ural region was supplied to socialist countries — Poland, the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Hungary — as well as to the country's ports on the Baltic.