The recurrent problem with extraction of natural resources in our country is that they are almost always situated in faraway or inaccessible places (or both).
This put an indelible mark on the entire Russian civilization. The history of our mighty State (Derzháva) is the narrative of rulers constantly trying to find answers to three perennial questions:
How do we get to the resource?
Where to find people to tap the resource and how to make them work?
How to protect the wealth generated by the resource?
Patrolling the perimeter and taxation as two core competences of our state—the result of more than a 1000-year long quest to answer these three questions. During this millenium, two major breakthroughs happened:
Imperial expansion
Peter the Great added to the toolset of our competences the military and bureacratic know-how needed for a sustained expanding of the perimeter. In other words, imperial conquest.
This gave us access to the vast, very fertile expanses of the Cumanian steppes. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it supported an explosive rise of population. We surpassed France in demographic terms around the era of the Napoleonic wars, and were on the course to become the largest economy in Europe if WW1 hadn’t started.
The imperial conquests also gave us access to the second most valuable “natural resource”: the pool of ready-made administrative talent in the Baltics and other areas of German cultural influence. This is how ethic Germans became the dominant minority in our Empire and ultimately took over the House of Romanovs.
Expedited colonization
The second breakthrough was achieved thanks to the Bolsheviks and Stalin. They introduced a massive use of slave labor for the purposes of colonization. All the three questions above were successfully addressed by the secret police, NKVD. They were in charge of (1) scientific research and geologic prospecting; (2) the Gulag labor force; (3) pervasive surveillance, data collection and management and border protection—the border troops were subjected to the secret police.
The result became an epic feat of colonization and industrialization in the territory from the Norwegian border in the north-west to Vladivostok in south-east, and from Novaya Zemlya in the north to the mountainous valleys of Tajikistan in the south.
The dismantling of slave labor and the dissolution of the Gulag system ultimately slowed down the colonization. Post-Soviet Russia has largely stalled in this process, reducing the effort to spot projects of petroleum extraction and upgrading the military infrastructure around the perimeter.