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PETROLEUM PRODUCTS SUPPLY AND HOMELAND SECURITY
Military History Magazine. July 2008.
The teamwork prepared by Russian historians P. I. Veshchikov, V. A. Zolotaryov,
A. M. Sokolov, M. V. Yanovich and others, was a publishing project of the oil
company LUKOIL and the Fuel Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces.
The authors attempted to reveal objective laws and tendencies in the evolution of the petroleum products supply system, its role in supporting battle readiness of the Russian Armed Forces. They showed its place among defense priorities of the country during the peacetime, as well as during the wartime. The book traces the uneasy way the petroleum products supply system evolved during the petroleum industry development in our country. Along with practical measures, theoretical aspects of petroleum products supply for Armed Forces were analyzed.
The book contains prolusions, six parts divided into fifteen sections, and an afterword containing short conclusions and recommendations on the subject being considered, as well as an ample list of sources used by authors.
It was noted in a brief retrospective journey into the history that the supply
of the Russian Army and Navy with lubricants was founded in the middle of the
XVII century, while the state interest in oil appeared during the emperorship
of Peter I (p. 39). The origin of industrial oil recovery in the Russian Empire
(first oil wells were drilled in the 1860th) was associated with names of military
people: engineer Colonel A. A. Burmeister, retired General P. A. Bilderling,
retired naval officer Lieutenant G. I. Zotov, and guardian Colonel A. N. Novosiltsev
whose activities were described in the article "The First Russia's Oil Spouter"
(pp. 43—46).
Since the beginning of the XX century, ships of the Russian Navy were being
equipped with powerplants using liquid fuel; the Army - with cars, tanks, and
plains; the consumption of motor fuel was increasing. All these factors caused
the establishment of a "provisioning system" for petroleum products - the fuel
service. In 1914, the fuel was provided by the Central Military-Engineering
Intendance for the Army, and by the Central Naval Housekeeping Intendance for
the Navy. The authors stress that, by the beginning of the First World War (1914—1918),
the combat power of the Russian Empire directly depended on own oil fuel resources
or its reliable delivery. By that time, the Russian Army reckoned 263 planes,
711 cars, 101 motorcycles, and by the end of 1917 — 700 planes, and 9930 cars
including 500 petrol tank vehicles and about 300 armored cars (p. 47).
The following two sections cover the twenty-year period before the Great Patriotic War (1941—1945), in particular: oil resources of the country, state and development of the oil industry and transport, reorganization of the petroleum products supply system in the USSR. Historians analyze the problems raised at that period and having negative impact onto the combat capability of our military forces, especially during the Soviet-Finnish war in 1939—1940. We list only some of them: severe mistakes in creating fuel reserves and oil refining facilities, systematic failures of existing oil plants to fulfill industrial plans due to slow deployment of technological processes, inadequate supply of the Red Army with fuel equipment.
In these sections, the reader will find materials about repressions in the fuel service between 1937 and 1939 (p. 94). As a result of these repressions, the base for training specialists "… has been created just 1.5 years before the Great Patriotic War, which did not make it possible to train sufficient number of specialists" (pp. 113, 113). By the beginning of the war, conclude the authors, "The Red Army had significant fuel resources at the theatre of war, but apparently lacked technical facilities to transport petroleum products to forces, units and subunits (p. 86).
The biggest part of the work (10 sections) covers the fuel supply for operational and strategic units of the Red Army during main operations of the Great Patriotic War. Within this period, not only result of a single combat, but the destiny of our Homeland depended on coordinated activities of enterprises of the USSR' petroleum industrial ministry. The authors figure that 1941 and 1942 were the most dramatic years for the petroleum products supply system because appeared "… the threat that the enemy will occupy Caucasus, capture oil fields and plants there, and come to the Volga river closing the way for petroleum products transportation" (p. 345).
From the knowledge point of view, there are interesting articles about the role of oil in Hitler's vanquishing plans; the fuel constituent of lend-lease; labor heroism of oil workers in the rear; significance of the memo sent on June 10, 1942 by Academician S. S. Namyotkin to Brigade Engineer M. S. Kormilitsyn, head of the Red Army fuel service; the pipeline laid beneath Lake Ladoga in June 1942; the failure of the Nazi' operation "Caucasian Oil"; fighting for Romanian oil; the petroleum chemical segment of after-war reparations.
The section "Petroleum Products Supply in 1946—2007 (chronograph)" describes
evolution of the industrial base for oil recovery and refinement, and transformation
of ways of petroleum products transportation for the Army, in historical aspect.
We should note that the book is nicely designed, contains many illustrations (old photos, portraits, posters, modern color photos), maps, schemes, tables and diagrams. It contains biographies of famous military men, scientists, heads of fuel service (V. G. Shukhov, I. K. Sedin, M. I. Kormilitsyn, I. M. Gubkin, A. V. Khrulyov, N. K. Baibakov, V. V. Nikitin, I. N. Basanov, V. A. Blokhin) extractions from monographs and memories.
This book should be distinguished from existing ones on this subject due to unique materials and their creative selection and description. Unfortunately, the authors did not perform historical analysis of such an important and interesting subject, but they generalized, in a professional and convincing manner, ideas about the role oil plays in activities of Russian Armed Forces.
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