Like Bukhara, Baku had only recently been opened to foreign travelers. In fact, I was to learn, only a small parcel of downtown Baku had been opened. Most of the rest of this sweltering city, sprawling along the western coast of the Caspian Sea, was still off-limits. When, on my first encounter with Intourist in Baku, I requested a tour of the whole city, my guide could only smile grudgingly, his attempt at official humor. “Little Baku,” he called it. “I can show you only little Baku. The rest of the city is really—he paused, searching for the right word—uninteresting.” In Sovietese, the word “uninteresting” generally meant “interesting,” probably “very interesting,” and for that reason tourists like me were barred from it.
The ride from the airport to the accessible heart of Baku took longer than an hour—seventy minutes, to be exact. The Caspian Sea glittered in the morning sun. The city skyline was uneven: a long pier reaching into the Caspian, a series of rundown houses two to four stories tall, and the ubiquitous oil rigs on both land and sea, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them, slowly rising and falling as though they, too, had had to adjust to the heat. The rigs looked rusty but seemed effective, steadily extracting from beneath the earth or sea what the locals called black gold. Baku and oil were inseparable: one a location, the other an invaluable source of energy and always a magnet for greedy investors. I could see that the city was divided into two parts: “black city,” where oil was the only industry, and “white city,” where many of the oil managers and workers lived. There seemed to be little else.
During World War II the Germans had made a frantic push toward Baku’s oil fields, assuming that if they could reach Baku, they would be in an excellent strategic position not only to crush the Soviet Union but also to open the door to Persia and the Middle East. But the Russians, fully aware of Baku’s critical importance, stopped them and eventually beat back Hitler’s panzer divisions at Stalingrad and won the war.
Baku has been of critical importance to Russia ever since the early eighteenth century, when Peter the Great, having more than oil on his mind, drove his army toward the Caspian Sea and the provincial Islamic city of Baku. If one of his key lieutenants could be trusted, Peter had targeted India and possibly China for imperial plunder. “The hopes of His Majesty were not concerned with Persia alone,” the lieutenant wrote. “If he had been lucky in Persia and still living, he would of course have attempted to reach India or even China. This I heard from His Majesty himself.” In 1723 the Russians conquered the eastern rim of the Caucasus, including Baku, throwing a Christian Orthodox flag over this region of bubbling Islamic pride. Two years later Peter died and the Russians were forced to abandon much of this region, but they kept an eye on Baku, which after many battles they seized and formally annexed in 1806, possessing it until 1991, when the Soviet Union disintegrated and Azerbaijan, like the other Soviet republics, took advantage of the moment and declared itself independent.
In recent times the history of Azerbaijan has really been the history of oiclass="underline" its discovery, its exploitation, and its sale on the international market. For many hundreds of years, traders and travelers knew about the abundance of oil in and near Baku. The first well, using percussion drilling, was built there in 1846, the first oil refinery, in 1858. Within two years Baku was producing 4,000 tons of oil per year. By 1900 it was producing nearly 8 million tons per year, a rather impressive output for the estimated 3,000 oil wells in Baku, which produced half of the oil needed in the rest of the world. The Nobel brothers and the Rothschilds were among the early investors in the Baku bonanza. Stalin largely depended on the oil reserves of Baku to keep the wheels of war turning during World War II.
Now, eleven years after the war’s end but only eight months after Khrushchev’s bombshell at the 20th Party Congress, Baku was beginning to show signs of a post-Stalin thaw in culture and politics. But it would clearly need more time before the thaw could affect the life of the average Azeri. In the meantime, life meandered from one day to the next, meaningful change still more a hope than a reality.
Compared to my hotels in central Asia, my hotel in Baku was luxurious. My room was large and clean and had its own bathroom. From a picture window I could see the harbor, one of the most beautiful in the Soviet Union. It sparkled in the sunlight, and I thought it resembled Plymouth Bay in Massachusetts, a horseshoe of land washed by the sea on three sides. Here, though, were oil wells. No matter how far my eye wandered, I still saw them.
When I went on my tour of Baku, I was kept close to the hotel. Everything was off-limits except the old city. The old city itself was on a high hill overlooking the harbor. The guide pointed with pride to the cobblestone alleyways and to a decaying mosque that had served as a fortress hundreds of years ago.
“Against whom?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
The guide said he did not understand my question.
“Why would you need to turn a mosque into a fortress? Who was attacking you?”
The guide, realizing that an honest answer could only lead to trouble, suggested instead that I see the remains of an underground Moslem bath house that had been accidentally discovered in 1941, when a cover of earth collapsed, revealing this ancient site.
But that was it—the guide had nothing more that he could show me. I asked whether there was a history museum I could visit, assuming every Soviet city had one. The guide looked troubled, explaining that he had to check whether the Baku Historical Museum was open for visitors. It had been shut for “remont,” one of the most popular words in the whole country. He called headquarters, we waited, and finally he got permission to take me to what turned out to be a very impressive building, once the home of a Persian oil merchant. We could have walked to the museum, but he insisted we go by limo, eliminating the possibility that I could have seen something along the way that was “uninteresting.”
The museum was impressive in one respect, disappointing in most others. In one large room it traced the history of the Azeri people back to the Stone and Bronze Ages. It was a superficial review. In another room, Azeri history as presented ran up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Again, truly superficial. Finally, the jewel in the museum’s crown: the Azeri people living under Soviet rule. This was fascinating for only one reason: the way Azeri history was shoehorned into the Soviet experience. My guide used every cliché in his communist handbook to paint Azeri history in Soviet colors, stressing especially how “progressive” Azeris unshackled themselves from “regressive” capitalism and embraced the “glory and wonder of Marxism.” Paintings showed starving workers fighting fat millionaires. It was a dreadful presentation. If there was a saving grace, it was in the beauty of the building.
After a shish-kebab dinner, which was delicious, I went for a walk along the promenade fronting the Caspian Sea, and surprisingly my Intourist guide made no effort to stop me. I was not alone, of course. It seemed as if everyone else was also out for a walk. As I noted later that evening in my diary, “They too undoubtedly have nothing else to do.” Hundreds watched a young daredevil wearing a parachute jump from a rooftop to the promenade below, a jump of over fifty feet. He landed safely and everyone applauded. Apparently this was his way of earning some extra cash because he ran around with his tubeteika in hand collecting coins. I gave him a ruble, and his eyes lit up. “Big tipper am I,” I muttered to myself.