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Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]
- Автор: Эткинд Александр Маркович
- Год: 2022
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wiley
- Переводчик: Sara Jolly
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]». Краткое содержание книги:
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.
A family of Russian entrepreneurs of Swedish origin, the Nobels, established their first refinery in Baku in 1876. The father had been making equipment for the Russian Navy for decades, and three sons inherited his business in St Petersburg. In 1873, Robert Nobel went to the Caucasus to purchase walnut timber for a new model of rifle but spent his funds instead on buying oil parcels. By 1916, the Nobel Brothers company, Branobel, controlled a third of Russian oil and the largest private fleet in the world. They transported kerosene across the Caspian Sea on tankers – the first was named Zoroaster – and then up the Volga. 8 Working for the Nobels, the brilliant Russian engineer Vasily Shukhov was the first to use the residue left after the production of kerosene. After a trip to the International Exhibition of Arts and Manufactures in Philadelphia in 1876, he invented an injection nozzle that allowed steam engines to run on oil fuel. Thanks to his inventions, ships and locomotives in southern Russia used oil instead of coal. This was a sign of progress: nowhere else was oil used so widely.
The population of Baku – the Caucasian Eldorado – swelled thanks to the influx of people, who lived cheek by jowl and ran their ethnic businesses. The Russians and Germans operated oil derricks, the Armenians and various Europeans controlled trade, and the Muslim Azerbaijanis worked as unskilled labourers. The Russian administration, led by a Georgian governor, reined in over-energetic Armenians. Social-democratic propaganda circulated in the oilfields. A young Georgian, who went by the undercover name of Stalin, led the agitation. In December 1904, he took part in a successful strike by oil workers: dozens of rigs on Nobel’s oilfields were set on fire, and the employers agreed to a nine-hour working day. Stalin later wrote, tongue-in-cheek: ‘Thanks to the strike, a certain order was established, a certain “constitution”.’
In 1888 the young Calouste Gulbenkian, a graduate of King’s College London, arrived in Baku. He was hired by Alexander Mantashev – a flamboyant Armenian millionaire who toured his oilfields on horseback and distributed cash without dismounting; he was also celebrated for the orgies which he held all over Europe. A refugee from the Armenian massacres, Gulbenkian went on to start up his own oil companies and sell them on. Each time he founded a company – Shell, Total and others – he retained 5 per cent ownership. ‘Better to have a little piece of a big pie than a big piece of a little pie,’ he used to say. Acting as middleman, he was able to create an oil empire of his own. The title of his recent biography, like that of Jakob Fugger, includes the phrase the World’s Richest Man . 9
With the demand for oil increasing every year, Baku was booming. But in 1905 bloody conflicts broke out between the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis. Hundreds of people died every day in street fighting, the governor was killed, and thousands of families fled from the town. The events in Baku coincided with strikes by factory workers in St Petersburg – they laid the ground for the first Russian revolution. In August 1905, a spectacular fire broke out in Baku, and most of the oilfields and refineries went up in flames. The export of kerosene from Russia halved, tax receipts dwindled, and even the bread supply to the Russian capital was under threat. The pipeline to the Black Sea finally opened in 1906 – its sponsor was Alexander Mantashev, the kerosene king. The Rothschilds’ Caspian company also extended its railway to the Black Sea. It so happened that the delivery routes opened at exactly the moment when production fell dramatically – the oilfields had been largely destroyed by fire or sabotage.
The unrest in Baku continued. The oil colony was turning into the empire’s gravedigger. The Donets coal basin also saw a powerful strike that turned into an armed uprising. Sprawling, overpopulated Baku was like the mining towns of the Donbas, but the bloody chaos there was different. The miners took part in the general strike and revolution of 1905 that led to the creation of the Russian Parliament. Destructive and isolated, the Baku events were provoked largely by ethnic conflicts, local propaganda and the vicious circle of violence. But it was actually Baku rather than Moscow or the Donbas that was the cradle of Soviet power.