Capitalist versus Communist Systems - Two systems or just one?
Are Communist economies distinct, as economic systems, from Capitalist economies, or are Communist systems and capitalist systems just the extreme ends of one economic spectrum?
By Jack Barkstrom
The Triumph of Capitalism
In 1994 Milton Friedman, the American economist observed: "Today there is wide agreement that socialism is a failure, and capitalism a success"[1] Communism, as an ideology, was considered a bankrupt belief, although the same criticism was aimed at liberals and liberalism. Free market capitalism was viewed as having won the battle between two diametrically opposed social and economic philosophies. [2] Based on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the acceptance of capitalism, and the expansion of the global market, it was hard to dispute the claim. If the arena of economics consisted of two systems which battled each other, then capitalism, by most standards, had won the war.
Somewhat obscured by the claims of victory was a fundamental assumption, namely that economics during the Twentieth Century, consisted of two distinct systems, constantly battling each other for dominance. Was the distinction real or artificial? If it was real, was the reality related to how the systems operated, or was it related to the fact that they came out with different results - market systems produced a lot of consumer goods and the Soviet Union always seemed short of goods? That 'reality' or 'real-world' reasoning might apply if economic systems were similar to manufacturing operations. The process for producing steel would be different than the process for manufacturing glass containers, although both would fall within the broader category of manufacturing. If the distinction was artificial, was it just a convenient classification method, or a way to describe two different approaches to economic problems. That would be similar to saying someone came from New York and someone else was from Los Angeles - a simple method of categorizing people geographically. Similarly, one person might be classified by job description - working in sales or working in construction - classifications which revealed something about occupational categories which made it convenient to study them.
Markets, and market systems, for all the use of 'power' terms to describe them, such as strong markets or powerful economies, are in reality, relatively fragile. The demand for individual products, within overall economic demand, is dependent on whether individual consumers make a decision to buy a product. At the high end, buying decisions can be based on temporary fads, or a desire to impress people, or how products are valued. It is not clear whether economic studies, which sound more like some kind of pop-psychology than serious economic analysis, apply to high-end purchasing decisions or purchasing decisions in general - Is someone willing to hold off immediate gratification for some kind of long-term gain? or maybe they will exchange a small clothes closet for a gigantic used tire, because to them, one or both of these items has value. Perhaps they might exchange a million dollar condo for a an EPA Superfund site, because to them the Superfund site has historical value or the costs of cleanup, have a value, even if it is a negative number.
Market demand in the middle, or non-luxury, range, is probably where most purchasing decisions are made. In contrast to the high-end market, it is somewhat stronger because of its size, but somewhat weaker, where individual products are concerned. Product demand in this area is more likely to be influenced by price fluctuations. Tariff barriers, even relatively small ones, can impact consumer demand, in this area. Product prices, and comparison shopping, are likely to have a greater impact on demand. What consumers can afford to buy, based on what their jobs pay, or what they have saved, or what credit they have available, is likely to play a bigger role as well.
Market demand, among poor communities, or at the lower end of the economic spectrum, could be described as weak, not because the desire or physical need for food or other necessities is lacking, but because they lack the personal resources to pay for them. The physical need, or natural demand for food is just as strong, but the economic resources necessary to create or sustain market demand are nonexistent. There may be a desire for high-end, even mid-level products, but, in economic terms, the lack of income means that market demand for anything beyond necessities does not exist. Markets, and market demand, in communities which are extremely poor, will be non-existent or weak.
Complaints about the unequal distribution of wealth, a belief that the rich were taking a greater share of the wealth, and that people were struggling to make ends meet, have been observations about poorer countries. But they are no longer limited to poor countries. Even in the U.S., the most-cited proof of capitalist success, they are becoming more commonplace. The disparity in wealth is an indicator that, even within the most powerful economies, markets and market demand are not uniformly distributed, with large variances in size or strength. The strength of markets, or sub-markets, varies from class to class or from region to region or from product to product, and while market demand can be described in overall terms, it is difficult to define it with a single number - the market for furniture is different from that of automobiles. Consumer demand and the strength of demand for individual products, within the overall demand generated by an economy, can fall anywhere along a range of numbers.
A Range of Outcomes
The success of capitalism or the free market seemed to know no bounds, except perhaps the boundaries of individual countries. Capitalism claimed all the economic activity within a country was part of the successful capitalist system. Had it forgotten about the pockets of poverty, when it made that claim, or was it just conveniently overlooking them? It was always trying to put a positive spin on its claims, with the theme that 'if people just worked hard enough, they had the opportunity to make it - they too could be successful.' Perhaps that was better than the alternative - calling poverty what it really was - evidence of failure. It was perhaps better to gloss over such evidence with phrases such as 'groups who had been left behind by society,' than it was to concede even the tiniest piece of logical ground to the charge that part of the successful system was actually not really successful - it was, for want of a better word - a failure.
Free market claims about the success of capitalism, exaggerated or not, were never seriously threatened by the continued existence of poverty, a relatively minor exception to an overall record of success. At the same time, conceding even a small chink in the armor of perfection, was to suggest that market forces were not totally predictable or operated with equal strength everywhere or had the same impact on different layers of society. The question of success or failure, thought of in terms of entire countries, could be applied just as easily to individual sectors within the larger economy - and it could change over time. East Texas, which had been a dirt-poor region of rolling hills and sandy soil, closer to the Louisiana border, than to Dallas, turned into an overnight success story, producing instant millionaires, when oil was discovered there in October 1930.[3] It proved to be even bigger than the Spindletop gusher of 1901, near Beaumont, Texas, which flowed out at the rate of seventy-five thousand barrels per day.[4] By April 1931, the East Texas reservoir, otherwise known as the Black Giant, was producing 340,000 barrels per day.[5] Within a single economy there were variances which might benefit one region or one group over others. Depending on the type of resource, were there even different levels of success. Did regions rich in timber resources do better than regions with mineral deposits?
Resource reserves and mineral deposits were only part of the equation, when it came to determining wealth. Markets, or market demand - the value which consumers placed on resources, the price they were willing to pay - was almost as important. It was also subject to change. The Spindletop oil discovery of 1901, for all the excitement the gusher produced, proved to be of such poor quality for kerosene production - no existing process worked - that it was worthless for lighting. It was found to be better, or possibly cheaper, than coal, when it came to heating and power and locomotion.[6] Railroad and steamship companies converted from coal to oil. In 1901, the Santa Fe Railroad had just one oil-fired locomotive. By 1905, it had 227.[7] In 1912 Winston Churchill would commit the British Navy to convert its fleet from coal to oil and all the ships built in 1912, 1913, and 1914, were powered by oil.[8]
Kerosene, which still produced soot and dirt, and potentially fire, had been losing out to electricity, when it came to the lighting market.[9] Gasoline, which had been seen as a by-product of the refining which produced kerosene, had been used mostly as a solvent.[10] It was discovered that its explosive properties, were perfect, or at least suitable, for use in the internal combustion engine, the technology which would dominate the auto industry, which began to come into its own after 1895.[11] The invention of a "thermal cracking" process, which used high pressure and high temperature, transformed gasoline from a mere by-product into a moderately available product.[12] By 1910, gasoline sales, for gasoline-powered motorcars, exceeded those of kerosene.[13] The rise of the market for gasoline-powered automobiles, and the demand for gasoline which accompanied that rise, may explain why the investors in the East Texas oil discoveries of 1931, were more excited, even as the rest of the country was still suffering through the Depression.[14]
If there were variances within a single economy, what happened when comparisons were made at the country level? Was it realistically possible to make general comparisons, such as a comparison between the free market, capitalist economy of the United States, and the socialist planned economy of the Soviet Union? If within capitalist economies there were wide variances of wealth, or, in competitive terminology, differing rates of success or failure, could the same be said of socialist economies. How did the comparisons work when regional differences were taken into account? Were better off or more productive regions combined with poorer regions to produce a country-wide average, or did serious economic analysis require a comparison of similar regions or industries in one country with similar regions or industries in another? The collective farms of the Soviet Union had come to symbolize everything that was wrong with the Soviet system while U.S. farms were considered the envy of the world, in productive terms. Within that broad picture, how did the increasingly difficult struggles of smaller farms in the U.S. and their disappearance figure in? If American farmers had greater freedom when it came to obtaining loans, what did the heavy debt burden or difficulties paying off loans say about the economics of farming, and how was that figured into the comparison? Russia, for all the emphasis on its oil, had other products to sell. During the Depression years, when the oil market fell, the USSR was exporting more timber than petroleum.[15]
The Market for Oil
Capturing the Baku oil fields in Russia had been the goal of the Nazi armies in World War II. Development of the Baku fields had come in fits and starts, marked by both inefficiency and waste, and innovation and advancement, with parallels to the oil industry in America. Oil had first been produced in small quantities in northwestern Pennsylvania by skimming it off the surface of springs or by letting rags or blankets soak up the oil from the springs and then ringing them out.[16] When Edwin Drake arrived in Titusville in the spring of 1858, the primitive methods were enough to produce three to six gallons of oil from a natural oil spring, along the appropriately-named Oil Creek, about two miles from Titusville.[17] What Drake proposed to do was to drill for oil, borrowing a technique called salt "boring" or drilling, from the Chinese, who had developed the process more than fifteen hundred years earlier. Some of the Chinese wells had reached three thousand feet.[18]
For Drake, it would take nearly a year trying to construct a derrick and steam engine, before he was able to begin drilling, in the spring of 1859. It would be the end of August of that year, on a Saturday the 27th, when his funds had run out, that the drilling reached a relatively shallow depth of sixty-nine feet and punched through a crevice. There was enough pressure to push oil toward the surface, but not enough to blow out the hole. On the following Monday, the drillers were collecting oil in tubs, washbasins, and barrels.[19]
Drake and his crew might have done well to hire a safety supervisor or consultant. One night the flame from a lantern ignited the petroleum gases, which set off an explosion in the storage area. This was followed by a fire which consumed the rest of the stored petroleum.[20] In April 1861, drillers broke through rock which had been containing a pressurized region, releasing oil which came out at the rate of three thousand barrels a day. The escaping gases suddenly ignited and the explosion and fire killed nineteen people and continued burning for three days.[21] Apart from the danger of fires, the desire to produce as much oil as quickly as possible, combined with a lack of knowledge about geological formations and production led to premature exhaustion of gas pressure, unrecoverable oil, waste, and unnecessary damage to the underground oil pools.[22]
The desire for instant riches may have led, in the early days of the industry, to waste, but the dynamics of the market also brought innovation and advancement - and production. By November 1860 seventy-five wells were producing along Oil Creek. The increase in wells and production was accompanied by an increase in the number of refineries, with at least fifteen operating in the Oil Regions, as the new producing area around Titusville became known. The refined product of the time was kerosene, rather than the gasoline which would be required once the auto market developed. Almost overnight, coal-oil refiners, which refined kerosene from coal, were eliminated. They either went out of business entirely or switched to refining crude oil.[23]
The market generating the demand for oil was the illuminant market, or the demand for light, both for city streets and for people's homes. The rise of the oil market was not just Drake's drilling success in 1859, but a combination of discoveries and inventions, including his drilling refinements, which occurred in quick succession, about the same time. Dr. Abraham Gesner had developed a process for extracting an oil from asphalt, which could, in turn, be refined into something he called Kerosene. He applied for a patent for the process in 1854.[24] It proved to be a good illuminant, but also gave off an acrid smell and, along with its tendency to cloud existing lamps, did not make it an attractive product for consumers. During the 1850s a New York kerosene sales agent discovered that a Vienna lamp with a glass chimney solved both problems, at an affordable price.[25] The Civil War also served to eliminate a rival market. It cut off the supply of turpentine, an import from the South, which was used to create camphene, a cheaper illuminant, with the disadvantage of exploding in people's houses.[26] In 1861 a Philadelphia shipper had delivered the first cargo of kerosene to London.[27] The European lighting market began to grow, creating a new market for Pennsylvania oil.[28]
Over time production rose to fill the newly developing markets. In 1860, Western Pennsylvania was producing around 450,000 barrels of oil. By 1862, output had increased to 3 million barrels.[29] In 1866, following the end of the Civil War, the Oil Regions were producing 3.6 million barrels.[30]
Rising output and a maturing market led to innovation. Little thought had been given, in the early years, to transport. Teamsters, with teams of horses, were hired to carry the oil in barrels to railway stops. Their monopoly position and exorbitant charges, forced producers to look for alternatives. Between 1863 and 1865, producers began constructing wooden pipelines. It proved efficient and cheap and, by 1866, most oil transport was over a network of wooden pipelines. The need for a more orderly system of pricing and sales led to the rise of oil exchanges, which made it more convenient and dependable to buy and sell what was produced.[31]
The Russian Market
St. Petersburg, the capital of Russia, with barely six hours of daylight, represented a potentially huge market for lighting and for the new kerosene-fueled lamps, an improvement over the light-producing tallow. American kerosene was already being shipped to Russia by 1862, to supply the growing demand for the newly popular lamps.[32]
The Russian oil industry was not much older than the Pennsylvania-based American industry, with a similar history of development. Like Pennsylvania, the arid land around Baku, along the western edge of the Caspian Sea, closer to Turkey and what is now Iran, had long been known for the oil which seeped to the top of pools of water. The remoteness of the area limited development, although by 1829, the Czarist administration had seen enough demand to organize a fledgling oil industry, structured as a state monopoly. At the time production came from eighty-two hand-dug pits. The Russian government began to take a serious look at developing the area in the 1870s, both abolishing the state-run monopoly system and opening the area to competitive private enterprise. The first wells were drilled in 1871-72 and by 1873, more than twenty small refineries were in operation.[33]
One of the individuals who took advantage of the new investment opportunities was Robert Nobel, the brother of the inventor of dynamite, Alfred Nobel. With twenty-five thousand rubles entrusted to him by another brother, Ludwig, to buy walnut, Robert bought a small refinery in Baku in March 1873. Ludwig may have been irritated that the money had been spent on a refinery, instead of mahogany, but when he visited he recognized the potential. He also had political connections - the brother of the Czar and the viceroy of the Caucasus. Like Rockefeller, he began a study of the oil business, even looking at what the experience of the Americans in the oil business had been. His studies paid off, earning him the unofficial title "the Oil King of Baku."[34]
Like the Americans, Russians found transporting the oil to be a problem in need of a solution. However, their transport problems were of a different nature. Instead of dealing with teamsters and horse-drawn transport, they faced difficulties related to shipments by sea - a six hundred mile boat journey on the Caspian Sea to the port of Astrakhan - followed by a barge journey up the Volga River, before reaching a rail line for delivery to the final destination. Wood for the barrels used to contain the oil during shipment was another problem, since little was available around Baku, and one solution - importing the wood from America or distant parts of Russia proved costly.[35]
Ludwig came up with the idea of converting a normal ship into a "bulk" container. Instead of using wooden barrels loaded onto the ship, the oil was poured into large tanks built into the ships. This solution was not without its own problems, since the heavy oil tended to shift and move on its own, creating handling problems in rough weather. Ludwig eventually found a solution to the threat of shipwreck and commissioned the first successful bulk tanker, the 'Zoroaster,' put into service on the Caspian in 1878. By the middle of the 1880s, his bulk tanker had proven itself on the Atlantic.[36]
Whether Ludwig Nobel was copying Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie, or was forced to make adaptations to deal with conditions peculiar to Russia, he organized the Nobel Brothers Petroleum Producing Company as a highly integrated combine. The company had its own network of wells, pipelines, refineries, tankers, barges, storage depots, and its own railroad and retail distribution network. He pushed his company to be the most scientifically advanced in the world, even being the first company worldwide to have a permanent staff position for a professional petroleum geologist. Ludwig's company developed to the point where it was producing half of all Russian kerosene. In 1874, Russian crude production was less than six hundred thousand barrels and by 1884 had reached 10.8 million barrels, almost a third of American production.[37] In 1888, Russian oil production had increased to 23 million barrels, equivalent to four-fifths of American production. Part of this increase was due to the sheer size of the oil reserves in the Baku region. One of the gushers, or oil "fountains," under such underground pressure, had gushed for five months at the rate of forty-three thousand barrels per day. Unfortunately, for all the scientifically advanced technology which Nobel had installed, much of the output of that particular well, named "Droozba" or Friendship, was wasted.[38]
If free market advocates were looking for a real model to demonstrate how capitalism had the potential to transform Russia, they might have chosen Nobel Brothers Petroleum, rather than the unproven potential model proposed after the Russian Revolution. The Russian government had seemingly been so won over to the free market potential that it even allowed Alfred to promote and sell stock in his company. To convince stockholders and potential investors of the value of his stock he was telling them that American kerosene had been forced out of the Russian market.[39]
For all his optimism and innovation however, there were contrary signals coming out of the Russian economy, which suggested the presence of significant obstacles to the development of any market, let alone a free market. Winter weather was so severe on the Caspian Sea between October and March that it was nearly impossible to ship kerosene. Rather than trying to continue production and store output, many refiners shut down for half the year. Geography and terrain were other limiting factors. The city of Tiflis, just 341 miles to the west of Baku, found it cheaper to import kerosene from America, which was 8,000 miles away, than obtain its supply from Baku. The closest Baltic ports were 2,000 miles away and transport involved both water and rail transportation.[40]
For Nobel, production was not the problem, when it came to profits, it was the lack of markets. If Western-looking cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg were eager markets for European products and ideas, the rest of Russia, largely rural and unaware of events in the outside world, had little interest in or need for what capitalist industry was producing. The agricultural regions, too poor to afford manufactured goods, were unpersuaded by, or immune from, the marketing campaigns which worked well in the European areas of Russia. Peasants, in contrast to European residents, did not find illumination a necessity. If Moscow residents found European products irresistible, forming a natural market base, the independent peasants could ignore, even defy, similar appeals They had learned to live without for so long that they were effectively indifferent to the market forces driving demand - not a good sign for a system whose very existence depended on some minimal level of interest in a product.[41] The solution, for Nobel, had been to look for markets outside of Russia, mostly in Europe.
Nobel Brothers Petroleum was not the only company interested in Russian oil. It may have carved out a mini-empire, with its dominance of the northern transport route, but there were others who wanted in, or a share. Perhaps the Russian government was itself looking for additional markets and felt the need to diversify. It gave permission to two Russian Baku producers, Bunge and Palashkovsky, to build a railroad from Baku, over the Caucasus, to Batum, a port on the Black Sea. When they ran into financial difficulties, they got help from the Rothschilds, the Paris-based banking family, who were willing to provide them a loan. With that help, the Baku-Batum rail line was completed in 1883. In 1886, the Rothschilds formed the Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Company, known by its Russian initials 'Bnito.' Batum's importance, as an export facility for Russian oil, quickly grew; even the Nobels decided to move part of their exporting operations there.[42] They still dominated the Russian oil business, but Bnito developed into Russia's second-largest oil group.[43]
Baku in Decline
Baku, after 1901, was giving out mixed signals. It was said to be in decline, even as it was being held out as a symbol of production. It was said that the early production practices had damaged the fields, leading to premature exhaustion. The early pioneers of the Russian oil industry looked back to its past history, its time of greatness. It was true that it was no longer modernizing at the rate it had been and between 1904 and 1913, Russia's share of world petroleum exports declined from 31 to 9 percent.[44] Even so, the outside world seemed transfixed by the Baku name, and its association with oil. Rumania oil fields, developed after 1890, represented a potential rival and, in some ways, became the focus of European investors.[45]
During World War I, the Germans were almost totally reliant on the Rumanian oil fields for oil, once the Allied blockade choked off most supplies. A brief Russian success on the eastern front led Rumania to declare war on Austria-Hungary in August 1916. The Germans entered the war and made the capture of the Rumanian fields their immediate goal. The British convinced the Rumanians to destroy the fields and sent in a demolitions expert - "Empire Jack" - Colonel John Norton-Griffiths to carry out the operation. The fields began exploding and burning on November 26 and 27 of 1916. The field of Ploesti, the final field, went up in flames on December 5th, just as the Germans entered the town. Some seventy refineries and an estimated eight hundred thousand tons of crude oil and petroleum products had been destroyed.[46]
It took the Germans nearly all of 1917 to restore production, but not entirely. By 1918 it was still only at 80 percent of its 1914 levels. They hoped for access to the Baku fields and seemed to have it with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed in March 1918. The Turks, a German ally, but an independent one, had their own plans for Baku, and sent troops to capture it. By August, the Turks had reached Baku and captured some of the producing fields. They were held up by a small British force, but when it left in September, they took the city. It was too late for Germany, which surrendered on November 11, 1918.[47]
The Baku pools, even in decline, somehow seemed to survive, even to continue producing oil. In 1928, the Soviet regime hired Frederick Koch, the grandfather of the current-day American Koch brothers, to construct fifteen refineries in the USSR for $5 million. Koch had invented a process for refining gasoline from crude oil, and was fighting with U.S. oil companies over patent rights. The agreement involved a number of oil-producing regions, such as Chechnya, but Baku was still considered important enough to be included. By the time Koch left Russia, he had made $500,000 (about $7 million today.)[48]
Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, began in June 1941. In August, Hitler's directive made the Crimea, the industrial and coal region on the Donets, and cutting off Russia's oil supply from the Crimea, a priority for Army Group South. Then he decided Moscow was to be the priority.[49] The diversion cost the Germans time. They failed to take Moscow and planning for the capture of the Caucasus oil fields, Operation Blau, did not begin until 1942. Despite the late planning start, the Germans captured Maikop on August 9th. Maikop was the most westerly of the Caucasian oil centers, but its output was only a tenth of that of Baku, under normal circumstances. The withdrawing Russian army eliminated even that capacity, when they destroyed the oil fields and equipment. German recovery efforts by January 1943 managed seventy barrels per day there.[50]
The German advance was slowed by the mountain passes of the Caucasus and by a shortage of fuel. Contributing to their difficulties was the difference in fuel used by the two armies. The captured Russian oil supplies consisted mostly of diesel, which Russian tanks used, but of no use to the Germans, since their tanks ran on gasoline. By November 1942, they had been stopped, unable to continue their advance against Grozny and Baku.[51] Hitler still dreamed of taking the Baku fields, but in January 1943 the German armies in the Caucasus were ordered to retreat. The order came too late to help the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, which surrendered in January and February.[52]
When the German capture of the Baku fields looked like a realistic possibility in July 1943, Stalin informed Nikolai Babakov, in charge of Soviet oil production, that he would be shot if he failed to stop the Germans getting Russian oil, pointing two fingers at Babikov's head for emphasis. He added that, once the Germans had been thrown out, if Babikov was unable to restart production, he would be shot again.[53] Babikov either was able to restore production or was a favorite of Stalin's, since he survived until 2008, when he was ninety-seven.
Two Systems or Not?
Free market supporters, either in praising capitalism or in criticizing the Soviet planned economy, maintained that success or failure could be explained based on the existence of two different systems, seemingly operating in parallel universes. It seemed a logical explanation for the differing results. It was not the only possible explanation. Alternatively, it was possible that the world of trade, or the market, was not, or could not be divided into two systems. The distinction was an artificial one, designed more to justify the success of an academic classification. In reality, there was only one system, where markets were concerned. Success or failure was based on resource allocation and shifting markets, not on capitalist or socialist systems.
There were two questions which were left unanswered. How did the capitalist or free market system work when it had to operate under conditions of adversity or scarcity? Capitalism worked well in a country, such as the US, which had nearly every advantage. Capitalism did not seem to work well in Russia, which faced serious economic challenges. This suggests that markets operate, not as two separate systems, but along one continuum, with a range of outcomes, depending on resources, geography, and climate. The second question is whether the planned economy of the Soviet Union was the result of socialist policies, or a response to economic conditions?
Footnotes
(1) Ellen Schrecker, Ed.,"Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism," (The New Press: New York) (2004), p. 6.
(2) John Mackey and Raj Sisodia, "Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business," (Harvard Business Review Press: Boston) (2014) p. 12.
(3) Daniel Yergin, "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power," (Simon & Schuster: New York) (1991) p. 246.
(4) Yergin, Ibid p. 85.
(5) Yergin, Ibid p. 247.
(6) Yergin, Ibid p. 87.
(7) Yergin, Ibid p. 85.
(8) Yergin, Ibid pp. 12, 156.
(9) Yergin, Ibid pp. 78-79.
(10) Yergin, Ibid p. 51.
(11) Yergin, Ibid p. 79.
(12) Yergin, Ibid p. 111.
(13) Yergin, Ibid p. 112.
(14) Yergin, Ibid p. 247.
(15) Richard Lourie, "Putin: His Downfall and Russia's Coming Crash" (Thomas Dunne Books: New York) (2017), p. 104
(16) Yergin, Op.cit. p. 19.
(17) Yergin, Ibid p. 27.
(18) Yergin, Ibid p. 25.
(19) Yergin, Ibid p. 27.
(20) Yergin, Ibid p. 28.
(21) Yergin, Ibid p. 30.
(22) Yergin, Ibid p. 32.
(23) Yergin, Ibid p. 30.
(24) Yergin, Ibid p. 23.
(25) Yergin, Ibid p. 25.
(26) Yergin, Ibid pp. 23 & 30.
(27) Yergin, Ibid p. 56.
(28) Yergin, Ibid p. 30.
(29) Yergin, Ibid p. 30.
(30) Yergin, Ibid p. 31.
(31) Yergin, Ibid p. 33.
(32) Yergin, Ibid p. 57.
(33) Yergin, Ibid pp. 57-58.
(34) Yergin, Ibid pp. 58-59.
(35) Yergin, Ibid p. 59.
(36) Yergin, Ibid p. 59.
(37) Yergin, Ibid p. 59.
(38) Yergin, Ibid p. 59.
(39) Yergin, Ibid p. 59.
(40) Yergin, Ibid p. 60.
(41) Yergin, Ibid p. 60.
(42) Yergin, Ibid pp. 60-61.
(43) Yergin, Ibid p. 61.
(44) Yergin, Ibid p. 133.
(45) Yergin, Ibid p. 132.
(46) Yergin, Ibid pp. 179-181.
(47) Yergin, Ibid p. 182.
(48) Lourie, Op.Cit. p. 103.
(49) Yergin, Op.Cit. p. 336.
(50) Yergin, Ibid pp. 336-337.
(51) Yergin, Ibid p. 337.
(52) Yergin, Ibid p. 338.
(53) Lourie, Op.Cit. p. 105.