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Soviet Union [USSR] Natural Resources
The Soviet Union is richly endowed with almost every major
category of natural resource. Drawing upon its vast holdings, it
has become the world leader in the production of oil, iron ore,
manganese, and asbestos. It has the world's largest proven reserves
of natural gas, and it is rapidly catching up to the United States
in the production of this increasingly important fuel. It has
enormous coal reserves and is in second place in coal production
(see
fig. 7).
Self-sufficiency has traditionally been a powerful stimulus for
exploring and developing the country's huge, yet widely dispersed,
resource base. It remains a source of national pride that the
Soviet Union, alone among the industrialized countries of the
world, can claim the ability to satisfy almost all the requirements
of its economy using its own natural resources.
The abundance of fossil fuels supplies not just the Soviet
Union's domestic needs. For many years, an ample surplus has been
exported to consumers in Eastern Europe and Western Europe, where
it earns most of the Soviet Union's convertible currency
(see Soviet Union USSR - Raw Materials;
Soviet Union USSR - Fuels
, ch. 12).
However, as resource stocks have been depleted in the heavily
populated European section, tapping the less accessible but vital
riches east of the Urals has become a national priority. The best
example of this process is fuels and energy. The depletion of
readily accessible fuel resources west of the Urals has caused
development and exploitation to shift to the inhospitable terrain
of western Siberia, which in the 1970s and 1980s displaced the
Volga-Ural and the southern European regions as the country's
primary supplier of fuel and energy (see
table 7, Appendix A).
Fierce cold, permafrost, and persistent flooding have made this
exploitation costly and difficult.
Data as of May 1989
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