During the Cold War, Soviet industrial products were mainly sold between the Eastern European Group and the neighboring countries of the Soviet Union. The foreign exchange brought by this kind of industrial trade is much less than the foreign exchange obtained by western energy exports, which can not meet the demand of the Soviet Union to import its own shortage of materials from the west. To this end, the Soviet Union regards expanding energy exports as the basic policy of developing foreign trade. In the 1960s, petroleum and petroleum products became the main items that the Soviet Union exported to the west in exchange for foreign exchange.