For almost 50 years, the world's biggest natural gas exporter has been supplying Europe's biggest economy — heating homes, powering businesses, cooking food and lighting up streets.
Russia supplies gas to countries throughout the EU, and many in eastern Europe are even more dependent than Germany, which acquires roughly 50% of its gas from Russia.
But the German market has long been the jewel in the crown for the Russian gas industry. According to Russian customs data, Germany took just under 20% of all Russian gas exports in 2020, comfortably making it its biggest customer.
Pipes for gas
In 1955, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer visited Moscow to establish diplomatic relations between the new Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet Union. A trade agreement followed in 1958 and by 1960, bilateral trade between the countries was booming.
In the 1960s, the astonishing wealth of Russian oil and gas resources was becoming apparent. Demand for German-made large diameter pipes soared as a mammoth energy business dawned for the Soviets.
West Germany had started providing pipes for the Druzhba pipeline ("Friendship Pipeline"), the world's longest oil pipeline linking Russia with much of eastern Europe, which eventually came into operation in 1964. However, the Kennedy administration in the US was spooked by the Soviet Union's growing energy sector and managed to push through, via NATO, an embargo on pipe exports from Germany to the Soviet Union.
However, by the end of the decade, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik policy was opening up the country's relationship with its eastern neighbors. That paved the way for a historic deal between West Germany and the Soviet Union in 1970, which saw West Germany agree to extend Transgas, an extension of the Soyuz gas pipeline, through what is now the Czech Republic into the southern German state of Bavaria.
In exchange for the gas, West Germany would supply pipes as part of a much wider arrangement known as "pipes for gas." Gas imports from the Soviet Union were paid with steel pipe exports in the other direction.
By 1973, Russian gas had begun to flow to West Germany, the same year as it began coming to East Germany, which was part of Europe's East bloc and a satellite state of the Soviet Union.
Several commentators, business leaders and academics have identified that 1970 deal as a significant fork in the road of the Cold War, as it established a mutual basis for economic cooperation between Russia and western Europe.
German imports of Soviet gas rose steadily throughout the 1970s, as various more deals were struck to increase supply. The oil crisis of the mid-1970s caused countries like Germany to further diversify towards natural gas as a source of energy, and the Soviet Union profited.
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