Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

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

Competing with the British Royal Navy, the American Fleet made an early transition from steam power to diesel. In the First World War, the Americans supplied the allies with 80 per cent of their oil products. In the 1920s, petrol-driven cars were already replacing both the horse-drawn vehicles which had thronged American cities and the trams that ran on electricity produced from coal. At the beginning of the Second World War, oil provided a third of the energy consumed in the USA – much more than in Western Europe, the USSR or Japan. Now oil was king. Without oil there would have been no fertilisers, no tractors to cultivate wheat, and no lorries to bring it to the markets. Without oil there would have been none of the houses, cars and lawns that defined the American dream. Every new generation of weapons, with the exception of nuclear missiles, required more oil than the previous one. Up to the present day, the same holds true for each new generation of people.

In the mid-twentieth century, the USA and the USSR were the only powers that had enough oil within their borders to meet their needs. Great Britain and France had concessions in the Middle East. Germany and Japan had no access to oil, although in peacetime they could buy unlimited supplies. The end of the war brought about an energy crisis in Europe. The coal mines in the Ruhr had been destroyed. Polish coal and nearly all the European oilfields were under Soviet control. Ten per cent of the American aid provided by the Marshall Plan was oil, brought to Europe from the Middle East by American companies. Thanks to local revolutions or the global Cold War, transnational companies stepped away, reducing their share of profits. In Venezuela and the Middle East, the USA agreed to share production with the local authorities on a 50/50 basis. Coups in Mexico, Iran and Egypt led to the nationalisation of oil and a fall in extraction. But the market continued to grow, as did prices. Between 1945 and 1973 the per capita consumption of oil in the USA doubled and the number of vehicles quadrupled. The developed countries prospected for new oilfields in the North Sea and Alaska.

The Soviet dependence on oil was comparable to America’s, though the uses of oil were vastly different. Following the Baku model, the Bolshevik government understood oil as its strategic resource. It had to be split between domestic use – mainly for military-industrial purposes – and foreign trade, which could supply foreign arms, goods and services in exchange for oil. Keeping a balance between these two functions was tricky because the leading Russian and then Soviet trade partner was Germany, the enemy in both world wars. Even in 1940, right before the Nazi invasion, the USSR supplied Germany with a third of the oil that it needed. On the other hand, the domestic consumption of oil products was kept in check, though the massive industrialisation of the 1930s consumed a great deal of oil. In exchange for raw materials, German and American corporations eagerly supplied the Soviet Union with cars, lorries, tractors and whole vehicle-manufacturing plants. But, in contrast to the American practice of boosting domestic consumption by car- and home-owners, the USSR directed its supplies to wasteful, state-controlled enterprises. Public transportation was predominant, and the number of cars in private ownership minuscule. But the enthusiasm for oil was unlimited. A famous poet, Nikolai Aseev, wrote in 1935: