In 2008, the Russian company Gazprom delivered 120 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Western Europe, an impressive amount in view of the fact that Gazprom's predecessor, the Soviet Ministry of the Natural Gas Industry (Mingazprom), first sent a small shipment of gas to Austria in 1968. Gazprom's prominence in the era of Vladimir Putin is well known, thanks to the case studies of specialists such as Rawi Abdelal and to books written for a wider audience, notably Marshall I. Goldman's Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia (2008). Per Högselius, an economist at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, provides in Red Gas a prehistory of Gazprom's current role as a major exporter of gas. He asks whether the U.S.S.R. ever engaged in “political blackmail” against Western Europe, which became increasingly dependent on Soviet gas during the last quarter-century of the Cold War (p. 221).

Högselius's sources range from the Oil and Gas Journal and other Western publications to books and periodicals in German, Swedish, Russian, and Ukrainian. He also cites documents in governmental archives in Geneva, Munich, Koblenz, Vienna, Moscow, and Kiev. The narrative of negotiations conducted, agreements reached, pipelines constructed, and gas delivered constitutes a complex story in which heads of state, energy officials, corporate executives, and engineers maneuvered for advantage in a highly uncertain environment. Institutional alliances formed and dissolved within countries and across borders from year to year, even from month to month. The twelve short chapters, illustrated by maps, graphs, and photographs, briskly carry the narrative forward.

As supplies of natural gas in the Netherlands dwindled in the 1960s, the Soviet option appeared increasingly attractive, first to Italians and Austrians and then to West Germans, who adopted the conciliatory Ostpolitik in 1969. By 1974, France and Finland had also become customers. Natural gas had the additional advantage of producing less environmental pollution than coal and oil: almost no sulphur dioxide and only half the carbon dioxide of coal. The main problems for Europe were technical, not political. Between 1968 and 1974, “the export system itself was built in a hurried, chaotic fashion” that caused “numerous pipeline breaks, explosions, and accidents” (p. 166).

Sales of gas to Europe provided the Soviet Union with a new source of foreign currency for the purchase of Western technologies. Having made the strategic “decision to prioritize exports over domestic supply,” Mingazprom delivered gas to Western Europe despite shortages within the U.S.S.R. itself (p. 166). During the harsh winter of 1973–1974, customers in Bavaria remained “happily unaware” of widespread suffering caused by “alarming gas shortages” in Lvov, Kiev, and Kharkov (p. 162). In contrast, the Algerian oil and gas company Sonatrach “earned a reputation as a partner from which anything could be expected” (p. 170). Europeans considered it “a much more difficult and unreliable partner than Mingazprom” (p. 191). In October 1981, workers in two gas fields in Norway went on strike, briefly interrupting the flow of gas, but no such strikes were ever allowed by the “authoritarian” Soviet regime (p. 192). The U.S. government, angered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the declaration of martial law in Poland, sought to punish the U.S.S.R. in 1982 by outlawing the delivery from Europe of compressors made by General Electric for the construction of the new Soviet pipeline to the Yamal Peninsula. This American “attempt at economic warfare” failed, as the West Europeans insisted on fulfilling their contracts with the Soviet Union (p. 189).

Högselius concludes that in the early 1970s, the Soviet Union could not have used the threat of disrupting the supply of gas “for political blackmail, simply because the volumes imported were much too insignificant in relation to total European energy use” (p. 221). Instead, the Soviet leaders valued their reputation for reliability and considered gas exports a positive propaganda tool, “used in the Cold War ideological struggle between capitalism and communism for the purpose of strengthening the Soviet Union's international prestige” (p. 222; emphasis in original).

This rationale seems dubious, given the increasing dependence of the U.S.S.R. on Western technology. In the early 1970s, for example, Mingazprom faced a conundrum as it planned a new pipeline, five thousand kilometers long, to newly discovered gas fields in Siberia. The ministry insisted on using West German pipes, which were larger and more durable than the best pipes available from Soviet manufacturers, but it lacked sufficient foreign currency for the purchase. The solution lay in “countertrade deals in which Soviet natural gas was traded for West European steel pipe” (p. 230). Likewise, Soviet plants could not produce the high-capacity compressors that the ministry preferred, so these were purchased from the United States and Britain. Reliance on the barter system and imported equipment to export raw materials demonstrated not the strength of the Soviet command economy, but its weakness. (Historians and economists, notably Kendall E. Bailes, Joseph S. Berliner, Loren Graham, Gregory Grossman, and Bruce Parrott, to name the most prominent Americans, have stressed the chronic disparity between the brilliant achievements of Soviet science and the relatively low level of technologies employed in the Soviet economy, military industries and space science excepted.)

Högselius demonstrates that, for the sake of a dependable supply of natural gas, West European governments and corporations maintained the partnership with the Soviet Union even as it conducted military and political interventions against its neighbors, as in Czechoslovakia (1968), Afghanistan (1979–1989), and Poland (1981–1983). Having located the main obstacles to the exportation of Soviet gas in the realm of engineering rather than geopolitics, he finds that the existing network of gas pipelines now has “more in common with ecology than economy” (pp. 234–35). This optimistic view reflects the author's perspective as a Swede and a historian of technology. His analysis supports the general notion that economic integration fosters universal prosperity and reduces international political tensions in the long run. It is a noble vision. Whether this trend will persist in the future, however, is in question now that the Russian government has redrawn the map of Ukraine.