The Oil Road

by James Marriott

  The Xram River gurgles in a small valley to our right. An enormous flock of sheep stretches up the hillside beyond, obscuring all but the border watchtowers at the top. The three soldiers wave us through, but we are stopped a few metres later by two prosperous-looking customs officials. They glare at our rucksacks: clearly they are not keen to dig through all our belongings. But their next question puts us on edge again. ‘Do you have any books?’

  Not hash or heroin. Nor weapons or explosives. Nor even large quantities of currency. Books.

  We had been warned that carrying printed matter in Azerbaijan could land us in trouble. Mayis had told us the saga of publishing Platform’s book about the planned BTC pipeline, entitled Some Common Concerns. In 2003 he had translated it into both Russian and Azeri. First he published the Russian version, inviting BP, opposition MPs and NGOs to the release. The response was fierce. Sabit Bagirov, coordinator of the pro-BTC coalition, threw a copy of the book across the table, shouting: ‘It is very dangerous to publish such books in Azerbaijan. You are supporting the Armenian occupation. You should be careful!’ Several newspapers ran articles attacking Mayis. A long piece in the Popular Front’s Azadlıq newspaper attacked the book as dangerous, asking why the National Security Ministry had not stopped it from being released. The article was signed ‘Saadet Jahangirqizi’. Mayis believes the author was a BP staff member.

  Nor was the MTN, the secret police, slow to act. The original publisher was intimidated to try and prevent the distribution of the printed Russian books. When Mayis tried to have the Azeri translation printed, he discovered that publishers had been warned not to do so. ‘I couldn’t find anybody in Baku to print it – it seemed like the MTN had spoken to everybody!’ Many had received a call making clear that this book had been deemed ‘enemy propaganda’. ‘Clearly, the government was trying to ban a version of Some Common Concerns that most Azeris could read. So I announced publicly that I would print it across the border, in Dagestan. A couple of months later, when attention was elsewhere, we had it printed by a large company that belongs to an ally of the regime. Because the company is so close to power, they don’t check what they’re printing as carefully. And the MTN probably didn’t even think to warn them!’

  Within days there was another storm of criticism and attacks on the book, but it was too late. Mayis and the Centre for Civic Initiatives had the books, and had begun distributing them.

  ‘Books?’ repeats the border official. Opening one of our rucksacks, Mika hands over the large volume of photographs of BTC, prepared for the 2005 Presidential launch of the pipeline and given to us by Orxan Abassov at Sangachal. Unable to read the English text, the customs official turns the pages, until he hits on one with curvy non-Latin script. ‘Aaaah – Armenian!’ he says, clearly happy to have caught us with something controversial. ‘No, Georgian’, James responds. ‘A present from BP.’

  The book seems to have generated enough excitement for the day, and we are waved on through a tightly fenced corridor, checked by three more soldiers, and then we have our exit visas.

  We make our way towards no man’s land. Then behind us there is a noise, and a soldier is running alongside the fence, sprinting after us. We speed up, hoping to cross the line before he reaches us, but it looks unlikely. ‘What’s your name?’ he shouts. And then: ‘American tourists?’ We smile, and we’re through.

  To our left is an old, disused bridge built of red brick: Krasny Most. Once the main crossing between the two countries, Krasny Most was the scene of the Red Army invasion of Menshevik Georgia in 1921. Following the collapse of Tsarist Russia, the Democratic Republic of Georgia declared itself an independent state on 26 May 1918, two days before the new government of the Azeri Republic also made its proclamation of independence, while in exile in Tbilisi. Ruled by the Menshevik Socialist party, Georgia requested aid and protection from the Western Allies, and therefore welcomed in British troops six months later – those battalions that included James’s grandfather and General Thompson of Baku. But the withdrawal of British forces in 1919 left Georgia vulnerable to the advance of the Red Army into the Caucasus. By November 1920 both independent Azerbaijan and Armenia had fallen, and Georgia stood alone.

  In the early hours of 16 February 1921, 17,000 troops, 3,000 horses, 400 machine guns and four armoured cars poured over Krasny Most under the command of Sergo Orjonikidze. Using the engines that pulled the oil wagons along the railway 4 Baku, the Bolsheviks intended to move five powerful armoured trains and eight tanks across the border. But further down the line the Georgian Army blew up the Poylu Railway Bridge.

  Despite strong Georgian resistance, the overwhelming number of troops helped the Red Army reach the outskirts of Tbilisi quickly.7 Once the bridge was repaired, the armoured trains tore through the Georgian defences and the government withdrew its last forces west towards Batumi. Nine days after the crossing of Krasny Most, Orjonikidze, riding a white horse, triumphantly led his soldiers into Tbilisi.

  After the new Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia was established and absorbed into the USSR, the Baku–Batumi Railway ran again through a single political unit, carrying oil to the Black Sea port. Lenin launched the Soviet Union’s New Economic Plan; production in Baku slowly began to mount, following the disruption of war and revolution. The Soviets engaged American, British, German and Norwegian companies to upgrade refineries and drilling technology in the oilfields of Bibi Heybat and Balakhani. The kerosene pipeline that ran parallel to the railway was repaired and augmented: the Oil Road had been re-established.

  A lone moneychanger stands in no man’s land on the new bridge, built parallel with the red brick arch. Beyond him is the Georgian border post in a smart new building with white walls, CCTV, an X-ray machine, and a digital camera to photograph us as we enter. A sign announces that this is an EU-sponsored checkpoint.

  BTC KP 446 – 633 KM – ჯანდარა (JANDARA), GEORGIA

  The marshrutka minibus to Rustavi, the first big city in Georgia, takes us near the massive Jandara Pumping Station. The size of five football pitches, this looks like a refinery humming in the morning air. Pipes, cylindrical oil-storage tanks and metal towers dominate the surrounding fields. We had passed it before on a train bound for Baku, and seen its yellow and red lights rear out of the surrounding darkness. A flare lit up the night and the white smoke rose from chimneys into the sky. It is daytime now, and the smell of sulphur fills our nostrils.

  This is one of eight pumping stations built along the BTC pipeline, two of which are in Georgia. Together, they can force the weight of a million barrels of oil a day over the Caucasus mountains. In Azerbaijan the 440 kilometres of pipe run relatively flat, rising gradually from sea level. In Georgia, a length of just over half that distance becomes increasingly difficult, as BTC traverses the 2,500-metre-high Kodiana Pass. To shift this much liquid geology over such a distance requires immense energy. The pumps at Jandara, working constantly, are driven by five turbines fuelled by gas from the parallel SCP pipeline. These are effectively power stations, providing electricity not to the villages nearby, but power to the pumps that force the crude onwards and upwards, towards the tankers waiting on the Mediterranean.

  Our marshrutka passes through a string of villages. In truth it is more like one long ribbon village. On either side of the road is a continuous line of houses, one deep, with a break of a few yards between the exit sign of one village and the welcome sign of the next. The indicators of spring are all around: cherry blossom in the yards, the land fresh brown and recently tilled. Five water buffalo chew on reeds. A man digs with a long-handled spade. Great egrets and hooded crows pick for grubs in the fields. Turkeys and pigs huddle by the sides of the road, near tiny churches, newly built and in good repair.

  White steel ‘grapevine crosses’ stand ten feet tall by the roadside. With curiously drooping arms, these symbols are said to have been spread in the fourth century by Saint Nino. To avoid Roman repression, she escaped beyond the borders of the empire
and evangelised in what is now Georgia, carrying a crucifix made from a grapevine entwined with her own hair. It remains unique to the Georgian Orthodox Church, – a distinct branch of Christianity that has been central to Georgia’s identity over the centuries. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Georgian Church has grown in strength and is courted by politicians.

  Sheep graze the short grass and the remains of last year’s crops. Lines of poplars and willows criss-cross the landscape. The fields are dusty brown, quite distinct from those of western Georgia, where in the Black Sea watershed the woods are verdant and wet. This difference in climate is ancient, but modern shifts are making themselves felt. Days later, we visit Marina Shvangiradze of Georgia’s Department of Environment, who explains to us that eastern Georgia is already experiencing major impacts of climate change. Local agriculture is especially hard-hit, with longer periods of drought and higher temperatures. Combined with strong spring winds, these meteorological changes have had adverse effects on agriculture: wheat production has halved, while sunflower crops have failed entirely. Georgia’s central cities of Tbilisi and Rustavi are already struggling with falling water supply.

  Far to the north we catch a glimpse of the Greater Caucasus. Among those peaks is Mount Kazbegi, one of the national emblems of Georgia, and the crag to which Prometheus was bound. This vast mountain range has historically sheltered Georgia and Azerbaijan from invasions from the north. Twenty years after the Red Army swept along the Caspian coast into Baku, and then Yerevan and Tbilisi, Soviet forces looked to the Caucasus as a defensive wall against another invader – the German Army.

  In 1941, the forces of Nazi Germany launched a three-pronged, lightning attack across the Reich’s eastern border. Punching through Soviet defences, they occupied wide swathes of territory. With 3.6 million soldiers, backed by 50,000 pieces of artillery and thousands of aircraft and tanks, this was the largest land invasion in history. Hitler had announced: ‘This war will be a battle of annihilation . . . It will be very different from the war in the West.’8 The Nazi plan was that the western parts of the USSR should be permanently annexed, in a model copied from the French and British empires. The war aim was partly to acquire resource colonies for the Reich – grain from the Ukraine and oil from the Caucasus; a redirecting of the Oil Road.

  Moscow held out during the brutal winter battle of 1941.Then, in Operation Blau, over a million German soldiers advanced south and east, aiming for the oilfields of Maikop, Grozny and Baku. A swift pincer movement at Kharkov captured 250,000 Red Army soldiers. The Soviets retreated, destroying oilfields north of the Greater Caucasus to prevent them falling in German hands. Within weeks the fascists had reached Orjonikidze, the main town on the northern side of the mountains, now known as Vladikavkaz.9

  The German Sixth Army was now in the shadow of Mount Kazbegi, on the border with Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia and within reach of Baku. Anticipating its capture, Hitler’s generals presented him with a cake decorated with a Baku oil rig. The Führer had earlier declared: ‘unless we get Baku’s oil, the war is lost’. Indeed in 1942, over 70 per cent of all Soviet tanks, aeroplanes and armoured vehicles were fuelled by oil from just two fields – Bibi Heybat and Balakhani. Without this crude, the Soviet mechanised forces would have ground to a halt. Since the Red Army’s 1921 cavalry-led invasion of Georgia, the Soviet military had become mechanised and oil-fuelled, able to field 30,000 tanks, more than the rest of the world combined.

  In the build-up to the war, oil extraction had been steadily growing. The day the Germans invaded, men and women were drafted into the oilfields as into the army. A week later, workers moved onto twelve-hour shifts, with no holidays. A year later, shifts ran for eighteen hours, seven days a week, with no rest days. As the last years of World War I had illustrated, oil was now the cornerstone of all modern warfare.

  Once the German Army was within striking distance of Azerbaijan, Stalin ordered Baku’s oil industry to be evacuated beyond the Urals. Ten thousand workers and all the drilling rigs from Baku were redeployed to the Volga, Tatarstan and Kazakhstan regions. Sections of the Baku–Batumi pipeline were disassembled and shipped east, and 764 wells were capped with concrete.

  Azeri oil experts soon made Tatarstan ‘the second Baku’. Within a year, Soviet oil extraction had returned to pre-war levels and the Nazis had failed to take Baku. The entire German Sixth Army was lost in the freezing ruins of Stalingrad; the Germans lost more men in one month than during the entire war on the western fronts. With enough oil to fuel its tanks, the Red Army slowly drove the Germans backwards. By March 1945, fascist casualties on Soviet territory had passed 6 million – 80 per cent of total German losses during the war.

  But Baku oil production had crashed. With the imminent arrival of the fascist army, the oil engineers had aimed to destroy the wells rather than seal them temporarily. Even though the Germans never crossed the Caucasus mountains, their presence ended Baku’s supremacy as the oil-producing centre of the Soviet Union. Its position was now shared with Tatarstan and Siberia. When work began on the next phase of development in Baku, offshore at Neft Dashlari, the new Cold War had halted the oil trade with the West. Until the 1930s the Oil Road had run north to Russia as well as west through Azerbaijan and Georgia by railway and pipeline. Now it ran overwhelmingly to the north.

  BTC KP 475 – 662 KM – რუსთავი (RUSTAVI), GEORGIA

  Lines of Khrushchevki stretch across the Gabardan steppe. The hazy silhouettes of these housing tower blocks are interspersed by steel mill chimneys with white and red stripes. The fifth Five-Year Plan, launched in 1951, doubled investment in housing construction. The next Plan, in 1956, doubled that sum again – although, as Khrushchev had declared in Baku, ‘these are only temporary homes’. The quality of materials, the methods of construction and the aesthetics of these blocks were sacrificed to speed and quantity.

  While such buildings are common throughout the suburbs of Azerbaijan and Georgia’s ancient cities, Rustavi is almost totally composed of them. In a region where most communities have centuries if not millennia of history, modern Rustavi is just sixty years old. The life of this new Soviet city started with a vast metallurgical plant built on the banks of the River Mtkvari, the Georgian name for the Kura, whose course we have been following since Qarabork. Founded in 1941, the factory was built by German prisoners of war captured as the Red Army pushed back the Nazi invasion. Stalin’s ‘war economy’ brought steelworks, chemical plants, pharmaceuticals factories and a new rail hub: a station on the Baku–Batumi line. The Rustavi metallurgical plant became Georgia’s largest employer. The immense factory administration building was more imposing than the seat of Georgia’s parliament in Tbilisi. Throughout the 1950s the Khrushchevki spread across the nearby steppe, housing thousands of workers. Barely a decade after it was founded, the city had around ninety massive plants, making it a vital cog in the Soviet machine.

  Rustavi’s success relied on the Soviet Union’s integrated industrial strategy to source materials and market products. Baku, Sumqayit, Gәncә, Rustavi – all were closely connected within one system. The rapid collapse of the USSR after 1990 saw its separation into new nation-states, each with distinct tax systems and currencies, and the destruction of the formal structures of organisation between resource base, factories and markets.

  Rustavi is now left with poverty, crime, locally produced vodka and Georgia’s first intensive security prison. Sixty-five per cent of the workforce is unemployed, despite the city’s population shrinking by over a quarter in twenty years. The metallurgical plant itself was privatised and, in 2005, sold off to Sheerness-based Thames Steel. Various dealings, involving accusations of corruption, led to the steelworks being taken from the UK investor again and handed over to Kolkhi, a British-run shell company. Today its future is unclear. Although the plant still manufactures steel pipes for the oil industry, there are reports that parts of the factory are being sold off as scrap metal.10

  In the first
days of January 2004, Merabi Vacheishvili and Eleonora Digmelashvili, two friends from Rustavi’s Khrushchevki, in the eighteenth and nineteenth sub-districts of the town, saw heavy trucks and tractors clearing land nearby. Puzzled – not having been told about any planned construction work near their homes – they asked the orange-jumpsuited workers what was happening. They soon discovered that these were preparations for the construction of the BTC pipeline. While both knew of the pipeline and had heard of its importance, neither had been told that it would come so close to their homes. Four multi-storey apartment blocks, housing 700 families, were all within 250 metres of the planned works.

  Concern quickly spread among the community. The buildings, low quality to start with, were dilapidated, and the pipeline construction risked fundamental structural damage. Later that month, the mayor of Rustavi admitted that he ‘had no clue that the pipeline would go so close to the buildings’.11 It is not surprising that neither Eleonora nor Merabi, nor other residents, nor even the mayor, were expecting the pipeline in their neighbourhood. The maps distributed by BTC Co. two years previously had indicated that the pipeline would run ten to twenty kilometres away from the edge of Rustavi. The inhabitants of the eighteenth and nineteenth sub-districts became even more worried once they realised that BTC Co. had declared a permanent ‘security zone’ of 500 metres around the pipeline, in which the construction of schools and hospitals was prohibited, apparently for safety reasons.12 But the security zone now incorporated the eighteenth and nineteenth sub-districts. It seemed that BTC Co. could lay its pipes as close to Georgian homes as it liked, but once the pipeline was buried, nothing could be built within 250 metres of it.