Fossil Fuel Communism: The Druzhba Oil Pipeline and the Making of the Eastern Bloc

In September 1958, five representatives from the Soviet Union’s Main Directorate of the Natural Gas Industry (Glavgaz) travelled to Canada to study the building of the TransCanada natural gas pipeline for one month. Interacting with American as well as Canadian workers, the invited visitors documented technical innovations created to overcome subzero temperatures and heavily-forested terrain. Just over a year later, in December 1959, delegates from East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary met in Moscow to sign agreements with the Soviet government about the construction of the first trans-European oil pipeline — the results of negotiations begun in 1956. Referring to this massive piece of fossil fuel infrastructure according to standard conventions in early planning documents, Glavgaz officials soon rechristened it with another name in 1961, Druzhba, meaning “Friendship.” During the next three years, Druzhba, the longest pipeline in the world still today, became the subject of myriad newspaper and journal articles, radio broadcasts, even a documentary film — in short, the symbol of a new European socialism. In this paper, I trace how Soviet bureaucrats and oil workers transformed Druzhba in this way, and thus reshaped global perceptions of socialism while using “Western” technology. In doing so, it reconfigures the history of relations between the Cold War superpowers from the perspective of petroleum management.