These towers suddenly popping up, black, dense, iron — these towers are no longer Russia. They are drilling towers, triumphs, symbols and revelations of the great power called petroleum; “nyeft” in Russian. The word expresses all the sweating fluidity of the substance. A historical sound and a historical sight. An atmosphere of capital, adventure, sensation and novelty. The greatest colonial power looks to these towers, and the greatest continental power holds on to them. This region alone produces at least half a million tonnes a day, the Caucasian earth is very liberal. Thousands of square miles are still unexplored and promising, volcanoes that issue fire signals every few months, betraying subterranean billions. (How barren and petty by comparison is the Galician soil of Drohobycz and Boryslav!) Give us money, money, money! chant the towers. We are ten thousand, twenty thousand — we want to be a hundred thousand, we want to be millions!
Outside Sabunchi’s little station is a blue-green lake, and beyond it a wild, shambolic, steep, treacherous, shitty, dusty path. It leads to the wells and into the town, up a small hill, with a church on its peak, lost, eccentric, puzzled, a feeble competitor to the towers, all alone among twenty thousand foes, cheek by jowl with the Soviet authorities. Left and right of the lake wait endless swarms of dusty droshkies. The coachmen stand upright like Roman charioteers, all of them shouting for custom. Around Sabunchi there are some quiet, distinguished dachas, or summerhouses. Sometimes — not often — a few passengers turn up to go out to the dachas. But there are a hundred times more “phaetons”. All the coachmen call out “Barin!” (Sir!) at once. Each one thinks twenty times a day the fare will choose him, and twenty times he is disappointed, and a thousand times he calls out. Here there are no probabilities, here a profession is a lottery. That’s what people are like: for the sake of tiny odds they will waste an entire day. Coachmen are gamblers.
The traders outside their sad Oriental booths shout themselves hoarse. Their quiet Oriental souls are agitated. Petroleum changes human nature. It ignites people even before it has left the ground. Here its aspect is more Asiatic than Russian. This is the gold-rush town from an American movie.
On the left is the market place. Extremely, preternaturally big green pumpkins litter the ground with their ovals and spheres. Fruits like a race of giants, the succulent diet of the people. Who eats so many pumpkins? More than twenty thousand workers live in Sabunchi; here are at least three times that number of pumpkins. These fruits of a lavish nature almost completely eclipse the grapes, the dates, the figs, the pears. There are a hundred stalls selling fruit, bread, meat, fat pigs, big, black-spotted, heavy, but nimble as dogs, pigs in a hurry: another whim of this southern nature. On the right, on the hilly ground are dwellings, sad, naked, reddish: they look flayed. The corridors are deep and black, the flats are open, the rooms give off a dull warmth, the dense aroma of a constricted life that is not unlike the smell of death. All round no horizon, only towers, towers, towers, black, cross-hatched, clustered together — as though they couldn’t stand unaided. They are so numerous and frail that they flicker and move. You turn away, oppressed by their grotesque numbers. When you turn back, it’s as though there were somehow more of them, they press and spawn and make more, they will eat up the big marketplace, the giant pumpkins, the mouldy, diseased houses.
The houses are temporary. The workers who live in them today will drift off to the settlements in a couple of years. For model working settlements are under construction in Azerbaijan. I go to look at one, not quite finished, already two-thirds inhabited. It’s called “Stenka Razin” after the Russian folk hero, the first farmer revolutionary who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, the lord of the Volga delta and the Caspian Sea, still revered today by the people with a tender affection that is far removed from hero-worship.
A deep gorge cuts through a mountain; people tell me it opens onto the sea. Stenka Razin dug it. Here he hid his stolen goods, from here he could run away. In the workers’ settlement there will be a monument to him, in the middle of a lawn: he never dreamed it would come to that. An alien doctrine adopted him after the fact. It would have struck him as odd. But it’s well-intentioned, and maybe he’d have come round to it. There is a playground for children, a club, a theatre, a cinema, a library. The buildings are ground level. Later they will grow up to be bungalows, because that’s the cheapest way. Moscow architects have devised more than a score of styles. Animatedness, difference, variety are the aim; no uniformity.
Only two years ago the earth was still bald, hostile, swampy, stiff. It breathed out death. The fact that it is now alive confirms the wonder-working force of socialism. How modest they are. In our capitalist Ruhrgebiet, which I visited in spring, they use the same means to turn the workers into little bourgeois. Here, they turn them into revolutionaries. Here as there: tin baths, electric sockets, space for a flowerpot, functional and practical furniture screwed to the floor, waxed boards you don’t have to scrub, a quiet gleam, a short sofa. How much that is already! And how little! The needs of the proletariat remain modest, whether he rules or is ruled. I think it’s to do with labour. There it’s coalmines, here the drilling towers. What a delight to man is a drill! How much more do you require of life if you spend eight hours, or six, or four, drilling for petroleum, for Saint Petroleum!?
Oh, I fear work is only a blessing because it stands in for joy.
Written in October 1926 for
the Russian series, but never printed
V. Albania
33. A Meeting with President Ahmed Zogu
On Saturday at five in the afternoon, I go to meet the president of the Republic of Albania.* His house is under military guard. The sentries salute. His aide is waiting in the ante-room. He is young, slender, a major; pleasant, briefed and ready to talk about the weather, the Albanian landscape and the perils of malaria: what you call an aide.
In the president’s room there is a portly, clever, older gentleman, who is the foreign secretary. He functions as interpreter and minder. The president wears the uniform of a general. Following some rule that insists a head of state needs a desk, Ahmed Zogu steps out from behind his. Greetings are exchanged. I am engulfed by an armchair. The president tells the minister in Albanian that he is happy to welcome the representative of a great German newspaper to his country; the great German people can be assured of the sympathies of the little Albanian people. The minister relays it to me, in French. The president permits me to travel the length and breadth of Albania free and unhindered, and with the support of the state. The minister repeats it in French. A bow. Another bow. Another. At this point, Ahmed Zogu switches to German. (He once served in Austria.) Had I been in Albania long. How long I anticipated staying. When and where I proposed to go. He desired nothing from reporters but the truth. The truth, I replied, was relative. Something that was true to one person could be a falsehood to another. Certainly, German reporters were obsessed with the need for truthfulness.