In the decades after Sumqayit’s foundation, the population rose rapidly. Within fifty years, the village of 6,000 had become a petropolis of 350,000. Over time, in parallel with the rising death toll from heart defects and cancer, Sumqayit became unruly. During the 1963 celebrations marking the October Revolution, a crowd from the pipe-rolling factory broke away from the festive march through the city. Workers stormed the podium where local Party leaders were standing and ripped down a vast portrait of Khrushchev that covered the façade of the Palace of Culture. Police battered the protestors with truncheons, but disturbances continued into the night. The residents planned a repeat demonstration on the tenth anniversary – by which time Heydar Aliyev was head of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan – but were foiled by the KGB.4
By the late 1980s, across the Soviet Union nationalism had become the primary channel used to express dissent. Both Azeri and Armenian dissidents showed their opposition to the USSR by making territorial demands – primarily competing claims over the mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Attached to the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan in 1920, this region was populated predominantly by citizens who were increasingly identifying themselves as Armenians. Tragically, the famed mountains, songs and orchards of Nagorno-Karabakh held a renewed importance in the evolving national mythologies of both Azerbaijan and Armenia.
In 1987 nationalist demonstrations took place in Yerevan, the capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia, as well as in Baku and smaller cities, followed by attacks on Azeris in both Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Azeri refugees fled east, arriving in Sumqayit during the winter. In early 1988 violence broke out in the town, this time with the Azeri majority targeting Armenian residents. The attacks began on 28 February 1988; by the following evening martial law was being enforced by Soviet marines, and 5,000 Armenians had taken shelter in the Palace of Culture. The numbers are disputed, with some estimates that twenty-six Armenians and six Azeris had been killed, and 4,000 people arrested. Almost all 14,000 Armenian residents fled.5
The deadly clashes in the Soviet Union’s petrochemical city marked a watershed in the history of the USSR and the future Azerbaijan. As Armenian militias gradually asserted their control of Nagorno-Karabakh between 1988 and 1994, ethnic Azeris were forced off their land and moved east. Many settled in the empty homes of Sumqayit, which had been vacated by the city’s fleeing Armenians. The continued violence between Armenia and Azerbaijan created a chaotic context in which oil corporations could demand highly profitable terms for investment in the Caspian. The new Oil Road was built in the midst of this conflict.
As elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, the political collapse of the early 1990s saw levels of toxic pollution drop in Sumqayit. This was due not to increased environmental regulation in the new market economy, but to rapid de-industrialisation as the planned economy came to an abrupt end. By 1998, only 10 per cent of the chemical plants were still operating. Residents said that the air was cleaner for a while.
In the early twenty-first century the pollution has started to rise again. The residents of Sumqayit feel that if the country’s increased oil extraction revives associated industries, as it threatens to do, emissions will once more increase and the dumping of waste will recommence. The gazovka is returning, as a resident says: ‘We’re going back to the old days. We can feel the bad air, smell the bad air, the city stinks after six o’clock.’6
BALAKHANI, BAKU, AZERBAIJAN
Two roads lead from Sumqayit to Baku – the main highway and the byroad that winds through Binәgәdi and the neighbouring suburb of Balakhani on the northern shore of Boyuk Şor Lake. Unlike Sumqayit, Balakhani was never intentionally singled out for urbanisation and transformation into an industrial city. Yet the forces of modernity swept over this community sixty years before Orjonikidze became a Soviet commissar.
Today, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century oil industry ruins that scar this place make it an utterly alien environment. The ancient oil derricks and puddles of crude are harsh on the eye, the sour air coats you, lining your mouth and throat. This is the premier destination for photojournalists visiting Baku in search of images of oil pollution and destruction. A deathscape of rubbish fires, rusting ‘nodding donkey’ pumps and collapsed concrete. The rotting remains of street dogs and other scavengers lie alongside abandoned oil pipes, all besmeared with black crude.
Balakhani had already been part of the pre-industrial oil economy for a 1,000 years – with crude extracted from hand-dug pits around the village – when it became a centre of mechanised drilling in the 1870s.7 Early photographs show it as a zone sacrificed to the extraction of oil. Like Bibi Heybat, it too had its gushers, such as the well named Vermishevsky that blew in June 1872, spouting 2,600 barrels every day for thirteen days. ‘All surrounding terrains were covered in oil’, and several oil lakes formed.8
The frenzy of speculation resulting from this and other gushers attracted capital to Balakhani from far afield. The Swedish–Russian Nobel brothers arrived within the year, quickly establishing a dominant position in this Tsarist province by snapping up assets from smaller competitors. Ludvig Nobel became head of the newly founded Council of Oil Extractors Congress – the oil barons’ club. In 1889, the English foreign correspondent Charles Marvin called Nobel ‘the Oil King of Baku’.9
The Nobels were able to draw capital from elsewhere in Russia to finance the new Branobel oil company. This gave them the power to create new industrial structures. The transportation of crude eight miles from Balakhani to the refineries in the Black Town had for decades been conducted by arba – workers using mule- or camel-drawn carts. These workers insisted on certain conditions of labour, such as the observation of Muslim holidays, conditions that the Nobels were determined to break. After observing the methods of John Rockefeller in the US, they began constructing a pipeline from Balakhani to the refineries in Black Town. In the face of fierce local resistance to the pipeline, which involved disruption of construction sites, the company brought in Cossack troops to provide security; in effect, the Nobels hired a paramilitary force.10 Eventually the Glasgow-manufactured pipes were laid, and by 1900 the Nobels had constructed a network of 326 pipelines across the Absheron Peninsula.
Ludvig Nobel also determined to drive down the price of exporting oil across the Caspian and up the Volga to cities in western Russia. The costs lay in the wooden barrels and the dock handling: oil was transported in barrels stowed on ships, in the same way that Rockefeller exported US products to Europe. So in 1878 Nobel commissioned the Zoroaster, a vessel with container tanks built into the ship’s hull – the world’s first tanker. The Nobels had transformed Baku’s oil industry, placing it at the forefront of technological innovation.
The tankers returning from the Volga shipped water as ballast, which was then used to irrigate the trees and shrubs that Nobel had planted around his mansion above the Black Town. Named Villa Petrolea, his residence became the social epicentre for Baku’s new plutocracy, and on Wednesdays and Saturdays ‘the entire colony’ would gather at the Villa Petrolea to play billiards and dance.11
The boom city began to draw in capital from far beyond European Russia. The French branch of the Rothschild Bank arrived and financed the building of a railway across the Caucasus to the Black Sea port of Batumi. Taghiyev sold out his holdings to James Viashnau of London, and between 1898 and 1903 British companies invested 60 million roubles in the Baku industry.12 Alfred Lyttelton Marriott, a great-great-uncle of James’s, visited the area in 1901 and wrote:
I was shown over the work of an English Company purchased by them a few years ago for 5 million roubles and now said to be worth more than ten times that amount. These works owing to their isolated position, escaped damage in the late fires which caused immense destruction and loss of life. The wonder is that there are not more fires, as in all directions there are large open reservoirs of the highly inflammable naphtha or crude petroleum, into which the oil is pumped up before being refined.13
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p; Western European capital was integral to the rapid development of an industrial working class. Workers flooded into Balakhani, Bibi Heybat and Baku, and, further afield, into the distant Georgian oil port of Batumi and all the towns along the Baku–Batumi Railway. Lenin described the transformation of the Caucasus in the 1890s: a country ‘sparsely populated, inhabited by highlanders and staying aloof from the development of the world economy, aloof even from history was becoming transformed into a country of oil industrialists, wine merchants, grain and tobacco manufacturers’.14
The process of industrialisation and the demands of foreign capital to generate maximum returns soon ran up against social resistance. From the 1890s onwards, labour unrest took place in all sections of these new oil structures, inspiring radical organisers and thinkers. Joseph Djugashvili, a son of an illiterate shoemaker, like the oil baron Taghiyev, would later become the most renowned of these organisers.15 Four years after Djugashvili was born, in 1878, the Baku–Batumi Railway was completed. Rothschild and Nobel rail tankers, rumbling and grinding though the Georgian town of Gori, must have shaken the shack in which he lived. Djugashvili became a key actor in the history of the Oil Road well before he took the name of Stalin.
In August 1898, the nineteen-year-old Djugashvili joined a clandestine socialist organisation in Tbilisi and started to read Das Kapital. Soon after, he was expelled from his Tbilisi theological seminary for ‘propagating Marxism’ to the oil railway workers. Two years later he aligned himself politically with Lenin’s grouping within the Russian Social Democratic Party, becoming an ‘Iskra-man’ and distributing Lenin’s paper across the Caucasus. Iskra – ‘the spark’ – was published in Stuttgart, then, as Lenin fled the Tsarist secret police, in Geneva, and finally at Clerkenwell Green in London. This vessel of radical analysis was conveyed to Batumi and Baku on Nobel’s tankers and along the Rothschilds’ oil railway. As oil flowed out of the Caucasus, ideas flowed in from distant cities, combining with already fervent labour struggles.
Djugashvili, now known by his nom de guerre of Koba – ‘The Indomitable’ – arrived in Baku in December 1904, after organising strikes in Batumi and escaping from exile in Siberia. A general strike had been launched, and he hurried to join other activists such as Sergo Orjonikidze, the future commissar of heavy industry and founder of Sumqayit, and Stepan Shaumian, the future head of the Baku Soviet. In previous strikes employers had refused the workers’ demands point blank, and sent in troops to break the pickets. This time the demonstrations were larger, and workers besieged oil owners inside their offices. In less than three weeks the employers were forced to negotiate, establishing a nine-hour working day, four paid days off per month and a raise in wages.16
Proclaiming victory, the Caucasian Union of Social Democrats issued a statement written by Koba:
Russia is like a loaded gun, at full cock, ready to go off at the slightest concussion . . . We should not forget for even a single moment that only the party committees can lead us in a worthy manner, that they alone can light for us the road to the Promised Land that is called a Socialist World.17
The successful Baku strike shook the empire, and unrest spread across Russia. The next month, 1,000 protestors were gunned down in front of the Tsar’s Winter Palace in St Petersburg on Bloody Sunday: the spark that ignited the 1905 Revolution. In Baku, however, Tsarist forces provoked communal clashes between the Muslim and Armenian communities, undermining workers’ unity and distracting them from shared grievances against the regime.18 One witness later recalled: ‘Thousands of dead lay in the streets and covered the Christian and Mussulman cemeteries, the odour of the corpses stifled us. The whole city was in flames and even the waves of the Caspian Sea, covered in oil from the burning wells, spat fire like a dragon.’19
Despite mass support, the Tsar suppressed the Revolution across the empire, and a period of reaction was enforced. But the situation in Baku had changed. The oilfields had been badly damaged, and foreign investors were shaken by the radicalism of the workforce. Unsure of the long-term security of their assets, they stopped financing rig developments and well maintenance. Oil extraction in Baku began to decline. By 1914, Baku had fallen from being the world’s largest producer to generating a mere 9 per cent of global crude. The Rothschilds, perhaps nervous after the bloodbath, merged their company into a Royal Dutch Shell trust.
Revolutionary organising continued, and now included expropriations to finance political activity. Kidnappings of oil barons and other raids became more common and high profile, including the capture of the ship Nicholas I in Baku harbour. Koba’s star was rising among the Bolsheviks. In May 1907 he travelled from Baku to London for the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, held in Hackney. ‘Two years of revolutionary work among the oil workers of Baku’, he later wrote, ‘hardened me as a practical fighter. In contact with advanced workers of Baku . . . in the storm of the deepest conflicts between workers and oil industrialists . . . I first learned what it meant to lead big masses of workers.’20
Organising among the oil labourers posed immense challenges. The workforce in Balakhani and elsewhere around Baku was deeply divided between different trades and distinct communities. Workers in the refineries at Black Town and the mechanical workshops tended to be Russians and Armenians, while those toiling in the oilfields were the lowest paid, mostly Muslim ‘Tartars’ from both Persia and the Russian Empire. Arriving from villages and frequently illiterate, they were looked down upon by others; contemporary writers like Essad Bey called them ‘savage labourers’.21 Koba and fellow activists lived among them in the cramped shanties of the Balakhani fields, trying to build a self-identified proletariat making strong demands. The Bolsheviks aimed to build a union that bridged the skilled and unskilled workers, and that would overcome the religious, ethnic, linguistic and national patchwork that was Baku in the first decades of the twentieth century.
On the Absheron Peninsula, amid the squalor of the oilfields, a radical social vision took root: one that looked beyond better working conditions and demanded the transformation of society as a whole – not only society in Baku and the Caucasus, but across Russia, and indeed the world. Amid the chaos of the oil rush and the gushers of Balakhani grew a vision of a new order, ‘the Promised Land that is called a Socialist World’.
MIRGASIMOV STREET, GәNCLIK, BAKU
Not far from the southern shores of the polluted Boyuk Şor Lake lies the Gәnclik quarter of Baku. The cold wind hurls desert sands against the blocks of post-war flats and surrounding bungalows. Entering a side road we dodge washing lines strung out onto the street and the men mending cars on the pavement, and make our way to the offices of the Green Party of Azerbaijan and Mayis Gulaliyev.
‘Feminism, decentralisation, ecological vision. You see Green Party ideology is the future political mindset for the whole Caucasus region.’ Mayis’s enthusiasm is unbounded. It warms us from the wind and lifts the shadows of Sumqayit and Balakhani. He believes a more ecological and socially just approach will rid Azerbaijan of its military conflicts, resolve local health disasters, restore the country’s capacity to grow its own food, rescue the Caspian Sea from pollution and offer Azeris ways to deal with water scarcity. ‘That’s why we started the party in 2006. People aren’t quite ready for it yet, but we’re getting there.’
‘On almost every issue, we need to come at it from the side, and there we can find a solution. Decentralisation offers a way to talk to the Armenians about Nagorno-Karabakh without one side ‘‘winning’’ and the other ‘‘losing’’. The solution to the unsustainable extraction of oil and gas – from both an economic and an environmental perspective – is simple: stop drilling for oil and gas. The regime makes all the profits anyway. Of course, if I was actually elected, the CIA would try to throw me out, saying I’m a Kurdish agent or an Armenian agent.’
Mayis is an intriguing character. Born in rural eastern Azerbaijan, he is a compact man of forty-eight, immaculately turned out, dapper in suit and
tie. He resembles a middle-aged Robert DeNiro – good-looking, heavy eyebrows, hair greying at the temples, and often smiling.
A physicist in Kazakhstan, then a post-Soviet ‘biznesman’ in the Ukraine, Mayis returned to Azerbaijan in the late 1990s. Joining the democracy movements campaigning against repression, he took a growing interest in environmental issues. ‘But for me justice was always the central issue – combining human rights, ecology and freedom.’ As politics and finance increasingly focused on oil and the proposed Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline after 2000, Mayis started raising major concerns about the real impacts on Azerbaijan. ‘Everybody kept talking about how we would become Dubai, and that the pipeline would bring freedom and riches. But it was a pipedream! This is a phrase in English, no?’ He giggles at his own joke. ‘Instead we just get an ugly bridge that cost one billion dollars!’
Being outspoken about the pipeline was a courageous step, especially for someone without a long-running political party or major NGO to back him up. Pretty much everybody in Baku ‘civil society’ was forcefully enthusiastic about the Western oil developments, with newspapers across the board denouncing anyone who was critical as a foreigner or a traitor. Even those opposed to the regime supported the pipeline, arguing it would boost Azerbaijan’s prospects against Armenia and bring greater employment and freedom. The powerful knew they would become richer, while the poor hoped they would get one of the promised jobs. Searching for allies, Mayis made contact with those raising critiques in Georgia, Turkey and beyond; so began our friendship with him. On this journey, Mayis will be our guide in Azerbaijan as we travel beyond Baku.
He no longer lives in the bungalow that is the Green Party offices, but with his wife and children outside the city. He explains how his garden makes him happy. ‘I have sixty trees, including apricots. Every morning I rise at six so I can spend an hour in my garden, working, before I come to work. I’m here at the office at nine. And each evening, I leave at six so I can spend an hour in my garden before dinner. I think all people need to have possibility to touch the soil, touch the earth.’
The Oil Road Page 6