Nature's Evil

In 1910, Stalin escaped from northern exile and returned to Baku. A fellow Georgian, Lavrenty Beria, started a clandestine organisation in the Nobel brothers’ factory; later, Beria visited Baku many times before he became the organiser of the Soviet terror in the 1930s. The Baku riots and fires continued for years. The extraction of oil fell by a factor of four at exactly the moment when it was most needed – during the First World War. When the war ended, thousands of Armenian soldiers returned to Baku with stories of the 1915 genocide fresh in their minds. The leader of the revolution in the Caucasus was Stepan Shaumian, an Armenian who had graduated in philosophy from the University of Berlin thanks to a grant from Mantashev, and who was briefly engaged to his daughter. In June 1918, as head of the Baku Commune, Shaumian nationalised oil, distributed land to the peasants and introduced an eight-hour working day. But now Turkish troops were approaching Baku. New pogroms ensued and, outvoting Shaumian, the town council invited British troops in. They came, but soon left Baku again: the British needed oil but did not wish to quench the fires and pogroms. The Islamic army of the Caucasus occupied the town and destroyed the Armenians. Shaumian and other commissars fled but were killed on the road. 10

Meanwhile international oil prices rose. The world war turned out to be a motorised battle, and the era of cheap oil came to a definitive end. The Red Army entered Baku; among its officers were Sergey Kirov and Anastas Mikoyan, two future leaders of Soviet industrialisation. In April 1920 the Bolsheviks nationalised Baku oil. Henri Deterding, a clerk in the Dutch East India Company who became the chairman of Shell, bought up the devalued leases on the Baku oilfields: he was betting on the rapid demise of Soviet power. In the upshot he lost millions and changed tactics. In 1924, he financed a plot of Georgian nationalists to capture Baku – he even printed fake Russian roubles. When this conspiracy failed he gave millions of real money to the German Nazi Party. His rival, Gulbenkian, made better use of his capital: in 1928 he bought dozens of classical paintings from the state-owned Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. Later Andrew Mellon, another oil baron, followed suit in these massive purchases, which subsidised Soviet industrialisation by plundering the old imperial collection. 11 The best use of the Baku profits took place far away in Stockholm. In 1895, one of the Nobel brothers, Alfred, the inventor of dynamite and co-owner of the Baku oilfields, set aside the bulk of his estate to establish the Nobel Prizes. The last owner of the Nobel company, the young Emmanuel, fled Russia in 1918 and lost his assets. 12 In the meantime, another engineer who got his formative experience in Baku, Leonid Krasin, became the people’s commissar of foreign trade for the new Bolshevik government. While negotiating in the European capitals, he outplayed Rockefeller by signing a trade agreement for supplying Baku kerosene to his American competitors at a fixed price. The characters and legacies of these oil barons were very different, but many of them made terrible mistakes. Their successes depended on scientists such as Mendeleev, engineers such as Shukhov or politicians such as Krasin; their failures were their own. Still, they earned incomparably more than their hired hands. Nobody, not even the Bolsheviks, could change this – though many tried.

Germany had a lot of coal but little oil. Benefiting from the work of the chemists of the previous decade, Nazi Germany created a synthetic fuel industry. During the Second World War, it consumed as much of this coal-based fuel as oil; almost all German planes were fuelled with synthetic petrol. But it was in short supply, and petrol plants were tall and conspicuous, easy targets for enemy bombers. In the war with the Soviets, Hitler’s priority was not Moscow; as the first step, he ordered the occupation of the Donbas and the Caucasus. But his troops never reached Baku. The strange feature of oil deposits – their location on the far periphery of world empires – made it difficult to capture them by force.

For the Soviet Union, remote Baku was central. Some of the most important leaders of the country – Stalin, Beria, Krasin, Kirov, Mikoyan, and also Kamenev, Litvinov, Ordzhonikidze, Vyshinsky – cut their teeth in the chaos of Baku. One of the lessons they learnt was how to make huge profits from a piece of land not much bigger than a lottery ticket; it was quite an experience for these sons of peasants and artisans. Using their usual methods of terror and surveillance, the Soviet authorities pacified Baku. But as soon as they relaxed their grip, anti-Armenian pogroms started up again. As in 1905, ethnic riots in Baku in 1990 again preceded the attempted coup in the capital – now Moscow – in 1991.

The blood of nations