CASPIAN SEA, PART 2
How the workers dethroned Big Oil
By Brian Becker
With a potential $4 trillion in oil reserves at stake, a
meeting of an oil monopoly consortium is set to decide on Oct.
29 which route an oil pipe line should follow from the Caspian
Sea to the world capitalist markets. On the eve of this
decision,
the following is the second of two articles that put the
Caspian Sea area - formerly part of the Soviet Union - into
historical context.
Where did the Soviet revolution of 1917 first take power?
History has recorded that the soviets - or councils - of
workers and peasants seized power in October in Petrograd, a
proletarian center and the city where Lenin's Bolshevik Party
was strongest.
Actually, the first soviet to seize power from the
Provisional government did so a month before the famous October
insurrection. It was thousands of miles away from Petrograd. In
fact, it was not even in Europe. It was in Central Asia in
Tashkent, the capital city of what was then known as Russian
Turkestan.
Russian Turkestan was a wide swath of territory running
eastwards from the Caspian Sea along the northern borders of
Iran - then Persia - Afghanistan and India. Turkestan stretched
all the way east to China's western Xiang region.
The Central Executive Committee of the Tashkent Soviet
seized power from the Provisional government in September 1917
without any direction from the Bolshevik centers in Petrograd
or Moscow.
To the north and west of Turkestan there were also
revolutionary stirrings in Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. These
territories border the Caspian Sea, along with Iran to the
south.
The revolution sweeping through the disintegrating Czarist
empire in 1917 was initially set back by the imperialist
intervention of British, German and Turkish troops. Many of the
new revolutionary governments were overthrown. In Baku, the
capital of Azerbaijan, the workers' government was forced to
flee as British troops moved toward this proletarian center. In
September 1918, 26 leaders of the socialist government were
captured and summarily executed.
Those were by far the most trying times for the new
socialist governments. Fourteen imperialist countries carried
out numerous military invasions in an attempt to restore the
old capitalist and landlord classes to power.
In the case of the extended Caspian Sea region, the
imperialists had more in mind than restoring the old ruling
elites. They wanted possession of Baku and the rest of the
region in order to recover the vast deposits of oil that had
been the source of enormous super-profits for Western
imperialist oil monopolies since the 1880s.
The Nobels, the Rothchilds,
the Rockefellers
Oil was first "discovered" in Baku by Marco Polo as early as
the 13th century. But modern large-scale oil drilling began in
earnest in the 1870s with investments from the Nobel family,
bourgeois Swedish refugees living in Russia.
Oil production in Azerbaijan became so enormous that it
became the focus not only for imperialist plunder but the
source of one of the greatest and earliest expressions of
inter-imperialist rivalry in the so-called "Oil Wars" of the
1890s.
By 1880 John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Co. - today Exxon
- not only had gained a virtual monopoly over the U.S. oil
market but was compelled to seek world markets since production
in the Pennsylvania oil fields was exceeding domestic
demand.
Rockefeller soon cornered the market from England and
continental Europe all the way to St. Petersburg in western
Russia.
But Rockefeller did not own the Azerbaijan oil fields. The
czar had granted this concession to the Nobel family - which
later would become notorious for its munitions sales, and even
later cleaned up its image by establishing the Nobel Peace
Prize.
The biggest single problem facing oil production in the
Caspian Sea, if it is destined for the world market, is that
the Caspian Sea is landlocked. How to transport the oil was the
central issue for the imperialist monopolies at that time - and
still is today.
In 1877, just as the Nobel family was about to build a
railroad from Baku to the Black Sea port of Batam, oil prices
plummeted. The world was gripped by a severe capitalist
economic crisis. To the Nobels' rescue came the Rothchilds,
representing one of the wealthiest families in France. They put
up the money for the railroad and thus became partners in a new
Nobel-Rothchild amalgam.
Within a few years, oil production in Azerbaijan surpassed
the United States. The Nobel-Rothchild amalgam sliced deeply
into the European market and what ensued was a classic example
of the division and plunder of the whole world by a handful of
monopolies. Lenin described this in his famous book
"Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism."
In the book "The Prize," Daniel Yergin describes the dynamic
of the "Oil Wars," which were a precursor to World War I, when
competition among the monopolies to redivide the world led to
the bloodiest war in human history up till that time.
"In 1892 and 1893, the Nobels, Rothchilds and Rockefellers
came close to bringing virtually all oil production into one
system, dividing the world among them. ... At one moment, they
would be battling fiercely for markets, cutting prices, trying
to undersell one another; at the next, they would be courting
one another, trying to make an arrangement to apportion the
world's markets among themselves; at still the next they would
be exploring mergers and acquisitions. On many occasions they
would be doing all three at the same time," Yergin writes.
Soviet nationalizations
When the Russian Revolution and its new Red Army of workers
and peasants finally ousted the imperialist invaders, the
Azerbaijan Socialist Republic came back into being. This was in
1920, two years after the massacre of the first workers'
government. The very first act of the new workers' republic was
to nationalize the oil fields.
The Nobel family - which had become a 50-percent partner
with Royal Dutch Shell - disguised themselves as peasants and
fled Russia during the revolution. But they managed to sell
their holding to Rockefeller's Standard Oil in 1920 - three
months after the fields were nationalized.
Why would Rockefeller pay the Nobels millions of dollars for
oil companies that were no longer their property? Obviously
Rockefeller shared the sentiment held by the capitalists
worldwide: that a government of workers and peasants was never
going to actually hold onto power and reconstruct a major
economy without a capitalist class.
As one of Rockefeller's monopolist counterparts put it in
1920: "The Bolsheviks will be cleared, not only out of the
Caucasus, but out of all Russia within six months."
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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