Abstract: The present-day economy of the Republic of Tatarstan (Russia) is a typical model of a successful, innovative and most significantly promising region. The republic holds one of the leading places with respect to a range of important economic development indices and as for qualitative social indicators got considerably ahead of a number of constituents of the Russian Federation. The reason of such powerful development lies in a variety of factors among which of course can be found existence of developed industry, availability of ample resources, of population with high-qualified occupational composition, competent investment policy, purposeful behavior of the republic management and a lot of others. At the same time, a range of historical factors which favored powerful development of the republic could be pointed out. The researcher makes a conclusion that accelerated development of a fuel industry was a key factor promoting vigorous growth of the republic’s economy. The study is aimed at the study of the course of development of the fuel industry (mainly of the peat industry) in the Republic of Tatarstan during the first half of the XXth century. Various historical and natural science research methods such as historical and retrospective survey, structured system survey, analysis and synthesis were used in the study. There were also applied such traditional scientific cognition methods as contrastive-comparative, historical-logical and problematic-chronological. The research is dedicated to review of the peculiarities of the fuel industry formation in the Republic of Tatarstan in historical sequence and gives information on the changes in administrative apparatus system of the industry due to the reforms carried out during the first half of the XXth century. The research is distinguished for its novelty, since the researcher didn’t confine himself to the traditional point of view on the republic’s economic development as an oil-producing region, instead he used the archive data to show that the peat industry had rather intensive development in the Republic of Tatarstan for a long period of time.