History of the Baku Oil Industry. Part 4

Chapters from the book by Ismail Agakishiev

After the discovery of the oil fields, Baku became a special place, where various economic and political interests of international coalitions, industrial clans and leaders were concentrated and clashed. VK begins publishing chapters from the book by Ismail Agakishiev "History of the Baku Oil Industry and the Second Oil Boom (second half of the 19th century - beginning of the 20thcentury.)". The book presents a historical analysis of the emergence and current state of the Azerbaijani oil industry.

Literature on the oil in Azerbaijan can be divided into two groups. The first one consists of a series of studies of Azerbaijani historiography, where economic and political issues related to oil are considered. The second group is devoted directly to problems of hydrocarbons. The work by one of the best scholars, a great erudite with an encyclopaedic knowledge, Eldar Rafik ogly Ismailov (History Department graduate, postgraduate and doctoral student of Moscow State University), entitled "Authority and the People (post-war Stalinism in Azerbaijan, 1945-1953.)", published in 2003 in Baku as a monograph, can be attributed to the first group of literature. In it, Professor Ismailov covers the most important events in Azerbaijan in the early post-war years. On the basis of archival documents, he shows the harsh living conditions of the Baku oil workers in those years. For the first time in the historiography, the topic of of the Republican elite that was in power at that time is covered in detail and political characteristics are given to many managers. The author provides a portrait of the First Secretary of Azerbaijan, M.D. Bagirov, who had outstanding organizational skills and was awarded six Orders of Lenin for the Republic over-fulfilling the plan of providing the front and the rear with oil.

According to E.R. Ismailov, Bagirov was a child of his time and a patriot of Azerbaijan. He sincerely believed in the cause of Lenin and Stalin and was a supporter of the accession of South Azerbaijan to North Azerbaijan. But it is also known that he controlled completing the lists of well-known oil workers who were to be repressed for not fulfilling the unrealistic plans for oil production in the post-war years.

The author’s data on the center’s management of the oil industry is interesting. Problems of development of the oil industry since the 1920s were within the sphere of influence of the Baku Party organization. Moscow considered this party cell as its foothold in the Republic and gave the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan the role of governing body outside of Baku. The outcome of the center’s policy was the fact that, until 1933, the functions of the first persons in the Central Committee and the Baku Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan were performed not by Azeris, but by those sent from Moscow. Since the 1930s up to the end of the war, M. D .Bagirov subordinated the Baku Committee and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan and became the sole leader of the republic. But after the war the situation started slowly returning to its previous state.

The second monograph by E. R. Ismailov, a continuation of the discussed book, was published in 2006. The book "Azerbaijan in 1953-1956: The First Years of the Thaw", the first in the historiography, investigates a special period in the country’s life, which in Soviet historiography is called “the thaw." The author succeeded in uncovering the basic laws of this complex phenomenon. Together with the processes taking place in the higher echelons of the republic’s power structures, the study focuses on the development of Azerbaijan's oil industry. The work is based on the archival materials of Russia and Azerbaijan. A real "best seller" could be a description of a book by another famous scholar, Dzhamil Gasanla, "The USSR - Iran: Azerbaijani Crisis and the Beginning of the Cold War, 1941-1946", published in Moscow in 2006. This book investigates little-known pages of Soviet-Iranian relations in the 1940s. After examining the unique and previously unknown material and documents from the archives of Russia, the U.S., Azerbaijan, and Georgia, the author comes to a startling conclusion: the "cold war" started not with Europe, but in Azerbaijan. It was the Soviet-American crisis, caused by the desire to control Iranian oil, as well as issues of accession of South Azerbaijan, then a part of Iran, to North Azerbaijan, then an integral part of the Soviet Union, that marked an irreconcilable conflict between the Allies and formed the basis for the subsequent confrontation between East and West. The author reveals the causes of disagreements between the Allies started from mid-1944. Since then, it was precisely the struggle for Iranian oil that became a reference point of the conflict between the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the U.S. and Britain on the other. The Soviet leadership was unwilling to accept a reduction of Baku's oil reserves and wanted to participate in oil production in northern regions of Iran, making use of Soviet troops being in South Azerbaijan. The Soviet leadership supported the national liberation movement of the Azerbaijani people, led by S. D. Pishavari. However, the threat of the atomic bomb on the part of U.S. President Truman forced Stalin to withdraw his troops from the territory of Iran's South Azerbaijan.

A monograph by R. S. Mustafazade "The Two Republics: Azerbaijani-Russian Relations in 1918-1922" (Moscow, 2006), which addresses important issues of the formation and development of Azerbaijani-Russian relations, is also of interest. In the context of the economic problems, a lot of attention is paid to the fight for Baku's oil between different states. A special place in the historiography on modern Azerbaijan is the study by S.I. Chernyavsky "Azerbaijan: The Choice of Course" (Moscow, 2003). This book is written by a prominent Russian diplomat who has witnessed the events he describes. Based on extensive factual material, the book discloses the first actions of independent Azerbaijan in the post-Soviet space. The author investigates the results of the activity of the first three presidents of the Azerbaijani Republic. The second chapter, among other foreign policy issues, analyzed the role of the oil strategy in strengthening the country's independence and the main components of the "energy diplomacy", such as the development of the legal status of the Caspian Sea in the context of regional security and the role and significance of the policy of diversification in determining pipeline routes.