Ukrainian Labor and Siberian Oil in the Late Soviet Empire

The development of oil and gas fields in West Siberia was a major event in late Soviet history. Exporting Siberian oil and gas, the Soviet Union secured its financial solvency, received food supplies, and deferred the collapse for two decades. First privatized and then renationalized, the same fields have provided the means of survival for the post-Soviet Russian Federation. In this article, we submit that the discovery and early development of these gigantic assets was an imperial affair. Many workers and managers of Siberian oil and gas fields arrived there from distant Soviet lands that had had experience with oil, such as Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Tatarstan, and Bashkiria. While some of these workers were individually recruited, many others came to Siberia as the members of institutional units that kept their allegiances to their homelands. Working in shifts, they pursued a difficult compromise between the centralized channels of profitseeking and culturally specific patterns of earning and spending. Based on archival work in West Ukraine and interviews with the former Ukrainian “shifters,” this essay explores the changing rules of this imperial practice. The relevant ministries in Moscow, some of them led by ethnic Ukrainians, boosted the Ukrainian contribution when the oil and gas production in West Siberia was coming into crisis. Later, the early post-Soviet privatization minimized the institutional involvement of Ukrainian business. Contributing to the imperial turn in Soviet Studies, this essay documents the immense gains and terminal risks that are intrinsic to a resource-based imperial economy.