Nenets Autonomous Okrug
This Arctic region larger than Nepal with under 45,000 people derives 99% of industrial output from oil and gas. The indigenous Nenets still practice reindeer herding in traditional chums while petroleum extraction from fields like Prirazlomnoye (22M tons/year) funds everything. A 2020 merger with Arkhangelsk Oblast was rejected to preserve autonomy.
Russia's most sparsely populated region exists because petroleum exists beneath its permafrost. The Nenets Autonomous Okrug—a frozen expanse larger than Nepal with fewer than 45,000 inhabitants—produces approximately 99% of its industrial output from oil and gas extraction. In 2021, 99.9% of all exports were crude petroleum. This is not diversification failure; it's geological destiny.
The Nenets people have inhabited these tundra for over a thousand years, following reindeer herds across the Kanin Peninsula and the islands of Kolguyev and Vaygach washed by four Arctic seas. Today roughly half the population still practices traditional reindeer husbandry, living in chums (conical tents) and migrating seasonally. They comprise only 18% of the population—Russians and Komi now dominate administratively—but embody an economy that predates petroleum by millennia.
The collision between these two economies defines modern Nenetsia. The Prirazlomnoye offshore field in the Pechora Sea produces about 22 million tons of oil annually, with cumulative output exceeding 183 million tons. In 2024, 39 new hydrocarbon deposits were identified across Russia's Arctic, bolstering potential expansion despite Western sanctions. Yet infrastructure remains primitive: only 432 km of unpaved roads exist, with no connection to Russia's federal highway system. Winter ice roads provide the only reliable surface transport.
In 2020, regional officials proposed merging Nenetsia into Arkhangelsk Oblast—a logical administrative consolidation. Local opposition killed the referendum. The Nenets understood what bureaucrats missed: autonomy protects the remnants of a pre-petroleum identity. Governor Irina Gekht, elected September 2025, inherits this tension.
By 2026, Nenetsia will likely remain Russia's purest example of resource-colony economics—extraordinarily wealthy per capita in GDP terms, extraordinarily dependent on a single extraction industry, and home to an indigenous population whose reindeer-based economy exists in parallel rather than integration with the petroleum that funds everything else.