Historians of the oil industry in the Caucasus have tended to focus on the years of upheaval and collapse prior to World War I, or else on a period several decades further on, when the industry was back on its feet. Having first visited Baku as a grad student intent on improving her languages, Sara’s interest was drawn to the untold story of the industry’s reconstruction in the period in between, the focus of her new book, Power and the Politics of Oil in the Soviet South Caucasus: Periphery Unbound, 1920-29. In this conversation, recorded on 12 June 2024, Sara begins by describing the rocky early years of recovery, characterized by equipment shortages and the use of forced labour. For Moscow the region’s oil was both an opportunity to gain hard currency (with Britain as the main foreign market), as well as something that might attract the wrong kind of attention from British forces further south. Although Russian commissars failed to secure international diplomatic recognition at the 1922 Genoa Conference, they certainly got the attention of leading British and American oil companies, fueling rumours of oily side-deals that would also swirl around the Lausanne conference the following year.

Rather than focusing exclusively on Moscow’s plans for the region, however, Sara’s book pays particular attention to Armenian, Georgian and Azeri actors, including Nariman Narimanov, who saw the region’s frontier with Persia in very different terms to Moscow. Narimanov welcomed the Red Army’s entry to Baku, even as he asserted the claims of local communities to participate in profits deriving from their oil.

Nariman Narimanov was important because he spoke to the Muslim population, to the Azeri population, and also to the migrant Iranian population. He saw an emancipatory vision in Bolshevism that he thought could overturn Russian imperial rule and allow for a more robust local rule, that would lift people up, provide education and make sure that the Muslim population was benefitting from the massive proceeds from the oil industry. He saw very quickly that the promises were not the reality.

Episode 55 – Oil and Emancipation

Podcasts are published by TLP for the purpose of encouraging informed debate on the legacies of the events surrounding the Lausanne Conference. The views expressed by participants do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of TLP, its partners, convenors or members.

FEATURE IMAGE: S. FEINTUCH, OILFIELD AT TCHELEKEN, 1911. ARCHIVES NATIONALES DU MONDE DU TRAVAIL, ROUBAIX. ROTHSCHILD FRÈRES/BNITO 132AQ 248.