The 1970s Energy Crises and the Threat to Czechoslovak Consumer Socialism

Abstract

In Czechoslovakia, the 1970s oil shocks could not have come at a worse time. Shortly after the 1968 suppression of the Prague Spring, state officials announced a permanent price freeze on electricity, gasoline, and coal for home heating. This effort to satisfy citizens’ energetic needs – while restricting political expression – came to be called the ‘cheap energy policy.’ The cheap energy policy bedeviled officials almost as soon as it was established, when, in the wake of the 1973 global energy shock and for years thereafter, wholesale prices of oil skyrocketed. This article focuses on the evolution of Czechoslovak energy consumption in the 1970s and how it navigated conflicting circumstances: a popular belief that socialist citizens had a right to cheap energy and increasing prices of imported oil and gas. It argues that Czechoslovak state planners aspired to rely on domestic coal reserves and strove for a policy of energy independence but were ultimately unable to disentangle their economy, and their citizens’ consumer desires, from oil.