Nature's Evil

Accustomed to dark nights, the world enjoyed using kerosene illumination after the bloody wars of the mid-nineteenth century. The first oilmen were radical utopians. In Trinidad, there was a lake of bitumen which pirates used to caulk their ships. In the 1850s, Conrad Stollmeyer, a German from Ulm, thought up a way of producing kerosene from this bitumen. He used kerosene as lamp fuel and also burnt it, in combination with cane waste, to boil sugar sap. Stollmeyer dreamed of liberating the black workers from their toil on the plantations but succeeded only in helping the plantation owners become even richer. They lost their battles, Stollmeyer and Lukashevich, and failed to liberate toiling people. However, their inventions did save thousands of whales. 4

In 1858 an oil boom began in Pennsylvania. Benjamin Silliman, a professor of chemistry from Yale, successfully adapted coal-fuelled engines, which had previously been used for salt brine, to pump oil. Lit with smokeless lamps, American cities devoured kerosene. With extraction booming, everyone expected that the supply would run out. But there was oil aplenty, so much so that the bubble burst and prices fell. Hundreds of entrepreneurs offloaded their oilrigs, which were nearly all bought by John D. Rockefeller. By 1890 his Standard Oil Company controlled 91 per cent of American output. The journalist Ida Tarbell, whose father had been ruined by the new monopoly, took the oil baron to court. Theodore Roosevelt called her a ‘muckraker’, a label which stuck to a generation of radical journalists. Woodrow Wilson supported her – he did not like monopolies. In 1911 the Supreme Court broke Standard Oil up into thirty-four independent entities. 5

The refining of oil into lamp fuel also started on the Absheron peninsula, where the city of Baku now stands. Oil had been always collected from wells and burnt in clay lamps there. In the 1860s Vasily Kokorev, another talented entrepreneur from the Pomor community of Old Believers, took an interest in the oil of Baku. With his experience of salt production, he was the first man to use drilling technology there. In 1873 he drilled his first ‘spouter’, which reached a height of 60 metres. Working with the young chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, the future creator of the Periodic Table of Elements, Kokorev mastered the process of distilling kerosene from oil. The distilling tanks were heated over oil flames and were situated right next to the oil spouters. Every four buckets of oil produced one bucket of kerosene; the residue was poured into the sea. Fires were frequent and impossible to extinguish. Kokorev felt that the expansion of his business was limited by the system of ‘farming out’ – long-term leases on parcels of oil land. By handing out bribes in the capital, Kokorev was able to change the regulations, and Baku moved to sales by auction. The workers’ conditions remained atrocious but wages were high. Three-quarters of the workforce were migrants. In 1888 Alexander III came to Baku, following the example of Franz Joseph in Galicia. In a decade, more than half of world oil would come from Baku, but the imperial government in St Petersburg was strangely inactive. The historian Alexander Fursenko has demonstrated that the Ministry of Finance in distant St Petersburg was interested less in the proceeds from Baku oil than in state loans. 6 The competing oil barons of England and America were behind these loans as well, and the game was complex.

This corner of the empire was too remote. Transporting kerosene from Baku to St Petersburg cost twice as much as transporting it from Pennsylvania. Imposing a high tariff on American kerosene, the Russian Customs Law of 1876 evened out the price difference. Still, on their way from Baku to the capital, oak barrels of kerosene had to be carried over the mountains by oxen, then across the sea by ship, then along the Volga by barge, and then follow the way of grain across the old imperial canals (see chapter 2 ). Mendeleev lobbied for the Baku–Batumi oil pipeline, which would transfer oil refining to densely populated southern Russia, but the government preferred to build a railway, which would also have military use. The ensuing debate between oilmen and officials delayed the pipeline for decades. 7 Everyone who was anyone in oil came to Baku, and the companies of Rothschild and Rockefeller competed with the locals for access to oil. Buying up shares and parcels, giving bribes and playing politics, most of them spent decades growing the same rapacious business – the exporting of kerosene and the pouring away of the oil residue.