This dissertation examines the extent to which negative effects attributed to the “resource curse” – notably Dutch Disease and the budgetary vulnerability due to revenue volatility – are evident across post-Soviet space. Four petrostates descended from the USSR – Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Uzbekistan – inherited comparable Soviet-era legacies (evident in institutional structures, physical infrastructure, and energy exploitation practices), yet found themselves following different trajectories marked by varying degrees of resilience vis-a-vis the resource curse amid their respective post-communist transitions. The case studies rely on process-tracing, supported by two years of fieldwork, to illuminate critical junctures and key shifts over time, while a “most similar systems” comparison aims to explain variation in outcomes across time and space. The theoretical framework seeks to bridge structural conditions – both the common Soviet-era inheritance as well as distinctive geographic, geological and geopolitical constraints – and agency as manifested in the creation of new policies and institutional choices, particularly following major crises (linked to sustained and steep declines in resource rents). To evaluate the ability of a petrostate to manage or bypass the resource curse, the dissertation employs an ideal-typical opposition between “developmental petrostates” and “non-developmental petrostates.” Movement in either direction is associated with a petrostate’s ability to execute three core tasks: (i) preserve and leverage the industrial diversity inherited from Soviet industrialization; (ii) maximize volume and control of hydrocarbon revenue for national economic priorities via public-private partnerships; and (iii) manage that revenue in a sustainable manner via counter-cyclical policies. This dynamic framework helps simultaneously understand within-case changes and explain variations across post-Soviet petrostates. It also helps explain Russian petrostate’s survival in the face of successive crises, including major sanctions on its energy sector, as well as the falling growth rate of Azerbaijan’s oil-dependent economy after it had become the world’s fastest growing economy at one time. At the same time, key elements of the framework, although developed within the context of post-Soviet transition, can be adapted to analyze variation over time and space across the wider universe of petrostates worldwide.