Over the weekend, at a meeting in Osaka, finance ministers from the Group of Eight industrialized nations warned that high commodities prices are a threat to the world economy. With the price of oil passing $130 a barrel, the American Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, singled out oil-rich countries for not investing enough in production.

As news outlets pointed out, most of the G-8 countries have little control over production. One, however, does, and it has leveraged that control, and its enormous reserves, to regain status as a world power.

Russia’s re-emergence as a “Petrostate” is the subject of Marshall Goldman’s new book of the same name (Oxford University Press, 244 pages, $27.95). An emeritus professor of economics at Wellesley College and senior scholar at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, Mr. Goldman has spent decades delving into Russian and Soviet economics, and his latest in a dozen books offers critical insight into the country’s energy sector.

After the tsarist reconquest of what is now Azerbaijan and the Caucuses in the mid-19th century, Russia began a cycle that has repeated itself in various forms to the present day. Foreign concerns, beginning with the Swedish Nobel family and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, were allowed in to exploit the petroleum reserves and lend their advanced technology, but after the Bolsheviks took over, the foreigners were forced out.

In “Petrostate,” Mr. Goldman takes a detailed look at oil production in the Soviet era, and especially the political leverage that ownership of some of the world’s largest petroleum and gas reserves offered: the use of oil to gain influence in countries such as Cuba and Pakistan, and the opportunity presented by the 1973 oil embargo, when Western Europe sought to reduce its dependence on uncertain imports from the Middle East. The West throughout the Cold War had held back its advanced drilling technology from the Soviet Union, which oversaw colossal waste through its emphasis on quantity over quality, but by the early 1980s, a natural gas pipeline linking the U.S.S.R. with Western Europe was in the offing, over the objections of President Reagan. It was completed in 1985.

The breakup of the Soviet Union and the division of its spoils provides Mr. Goldman with his meatiest material. While the Ministry of the Gas Industry was preserved whole as a hybrid state corporate entity — in 1989, it became Gazprom, with the gas minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, installed as its CEO — the Ministry of Petroleum privatized its oil fields.

The chaos that ensued, Mr. Goldman writes, was foreseeable. As many Russians traded away the vouchers they received from President Yeltsin’s government for a bottle of vodka instead of using them to purchase stock in the country’s new companies, a small group of men was preparing the ground for takeovers on a huge scale.

Through the tainted Loans for Shares program, for example, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his Bank Menatep were able, by way of a rigged auction, to gain control of the huge oil fields of Yukos for a mere $309 million, Mr. Goldman writes. The company, one of many controlled by the country’s new “oligarch” class, soon had a market share of $15 billion.

With production and the price of oil dropping as the 1990s progressed, Russia again turned to foreign partners, allowing British Petroleum to buy part of the Russian oil concern TNK, and permitting the signing of production sharing agreements with Royal Dutch Shell and Total, among others, to drill in the inhospitable fields off the island of Sakhalin.

But after Russia hit rock bottom with the August 1998 default and crash, commodities prices began to rise again, as did demand for oil and gas in India and China. A year later, and five months after the economy began its turnaround, Mr. Goldman writes, an unknown from St. Petersburg named Vladimir Putin was appointed prime minister.

As president, and now again as prime minister, Mr. Putin has presided over economic growth approaching 8% a year. He laid out his economic strategy in a dissertation in 1997: Instead of allowing Russia’s oligarch-controlled corporations to focus exclusively on making a profit, they should be used to advance the country’s national interests. Russia should welcome direct foreign investment, but Russia alone should retain operating control.

Sibneft and Yukos, which was flirting with the idea of selling itself to ExxonMobil and Chevron, were reined in, and the oligarchs who controlled them were jailed or fled abroad. Production sharing agreements in Sakhalin, which Mr. Putin had referred to as “a colonial agreement,” were adjusted in Russia’s favor. Companies known as “national champions,” such as Gazprom and Rosneft, now check in advance with Mr. Putin before selling assets to a foreign company.

In a welcome contrast to aggrieved Western press reports about Mr. Putin’s economic strategy and the subsequent fall of oligarchs such as Mr. Khodorkovsky, Mr. Goldman takes an agnostic view on these developments. “In all fairness,” he writes, “the way the Russian government reacts when foreign investors attempt to buy their energy resources is not that atypical of how other countries react in a similar situation. If anything, most members of OPEC, for example, are even more protective.”

He does have a stern warning for Western Europe, however. The region has become dangerously dependent on Russia for natural gas, he writes. With its spreading network of pipelines, Gazprom now has the power to let Europe freeze if it so chooses.

Although the deputy chairman of the state-controlled gas giant, Alexander Medvedev, proclaims that “what is good for Gazprom is good for the world,” Mr. Goldman points out that over the years, the Soviet Union and now Russia have not hesitated to reduce or halt the flow of gas. Squabbles with Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia over the last few years have made hollow Gazprom’s pledges that it is a reliable energy partner. While the Europeans and Americans have sought to break Gazprom’s pipeline monopoly by promoting the construction of a bypass gas pipeline under the Caspian through Azerbaijan and Georgia to Turkey, they are getting a late start to what Mr. Goldman calls Mr. Putin’s “giant chess game.” Russia’s power today, he writes, now exceeds the military might it had during the Cold War. With no mutually assured destruction, there is no mutually assured restraint, giving Russia more economic clout than Europe or even the kingdom with the world’s largest proven oil reserves, Saudi Arabia.

The chess game continues.

mmercer@nysun.com