2026-06-27 –, Room 201 (Seats 42)
After the Second World War, the primary energy source in industrialized countries shifted rapidly from coal to oil, and from the 1960s, gradually to natural gas. Unlike coal and oil, which could be traded globally without direct connections between suppliers and consumers, transporting natural gas required dedicated infrastructure such as pipelines or specialized LNG facilities. Natural gas was, in this sense, a "relationship commodity" (Gustafson 2020).
This paper analyzes the relationships, networks, and negotiations surrounding the transport of Iranian gas between Iran and the Soviet Union, West Germany, and Japan during the 1960s and 1970s, drawing on newly accessible archival documents from Moscow, Berlin, Prague, and Tokyo. When Iran considered exporting associated gas in the 1960s, the Soviet Union became a natural partner, since pipelines were technically far easier than LNG. Although itself a gas producer, the Soviet Union needed energy for the Transcaucasus, and the two parties agreed to construct the Iranian Gas Trunk Line I (IGAT I). Following its successful launch, Iran continued negotiations for further gas exports with other countries. West Germany responded positively to a transit pipeline through Soviet territory, while Japan considered importing Iranian LNG to supplement supplies from Brunei. Amid the oil crises of the 1970s, Iranian gas became a global commodity that the Shah sought to export at high prices by playing off industrialized countries from both sides of the Cold War divide. Ultimately, a Soviet–West German alliance won the deal, and construction of IGAT II began. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, however, ended this Eurasian gas project. Left unrealized, IGAT II nonetheless demonstrates how quickly natural gas became a trans-Eurasian relationship commodity, foreshadowing the later Siberia–Western Europe gas pipeline.
Cold War; Soviet Union; Natural Gas; West Germany; Japan
Jun Fujisawa is Associate Professor at Kobe University, where he teaches European and Russian history. He has written a book and articles on several aspects of the Soviet foreign economic policies in the CMEA including Soviet CMEA Policy and the Cold War: The Energy Resource Problem and Globalization [in Japanese] (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2019) and “Soviet Aid and the Mongolian Economy: The Global South in CMEA, 1962-1991,” Cold War History 25:3 (2025): 377-398. His current project is about the end of the Cold War and economic relations within the Eastern Bloc.