on stilts, 15 miles long and a half mile wide,” with 125 miles of road and a number of multistory apartment buildings built on artificial rock islands. Once it had been regarded as one of the great achievements of Soviet engineering, a “legend in the open sea.” But now Oily Rocks was so dilapidated that parts of it were crumbling and falling into the sea, and some parts were considered so treacherous that they had been abandoned and closed off altogether .7
Onshore, in and around Baku, were innumerable antique “nodding donkeys,” still bobbing up and down, helping to pump up oil from wells that had been drilled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hiking into the wide, dry Kirmaky Valley just north of Baku would take one back even earlier in time. There one would step over pipelines and clamber up barren hills that were pockmarked with hundreds of pits that been dug by hand in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In those days, one or two men would be lowered into each of these narrow, dangerous pits, past walls reinforced with wood planks, 25 to 50 feet down to the claustrophobic bottom, where they would fill buckets with oil that would be hoisted out with primitive rope pulleys.
Down on the other side of the hill was the Balachanavaya Field, where a gusher had been drilled in 1871. That field was still crowded with old rigs, densely packed up against one another, some of them going back to the days of the Nobels and the Rothschilds. Altogether 5 billion barrels of oil had been extracted from the field, and it was still modestly producing away, while gas leaking from a nearby mountainside continued to burn in an “eternal flame.”
Thus, awaiting the arriving oil men in Azerbaijan was an industry deep into decline and decay, starved of investment, modern technology, and sheer attention. Yet what the oil men also saw, if not altogether clearly, was the opportunity—though tempered by many risks and uncertainties.
“ALL ROADS ARE THERE”
Azerbaijan was ground zero for the Caspian Derby. As a Russian energy minister put it, it was the “key” to the Caspian, for “all roads are there.” Every kind of issue was at play, and so many of them the result of geography. The most immediate problem was to the west, the newly independent state of Armenia, with which war had broken out over the disputed enclave Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenia, with some Russian support, was victorious; 800,000 ethnic Azeris, primarily from Nagorno-Karabakh, became refugees and “internally displaced peoples,” living in tent cities and corrugated tin huts and whatever else Azerbaijan could find for them. This displacement—equivalent to 10 percent of the Azeri population—added to the woes of what was already an impoverished country, with a broken-down infrastructure and teetering on economic collapse.
In the first years of the 1990s, various consortia of international oil companies pursued what has been described as “disruptive and complex negotiations” with successive Azeri governments, which had largely come to naught. The country itself seemed to be entrapped in endemic instability and insurgencies, and, as various clans struggled for power, headed toward civil war.8
“THE NATIVE SON”
During Soviet times, Heydar Aliyev had risen to the pinnacle of power in Azerbaijan, initially as a KGB general and then head of the local KGB, and then as first secretary of the Azeri Communist Party. He had subsequently moved to Moscow and into the ruling Politburo, becoming for a time one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union. But after a fiery falling-out with Mikhail Gorbachev and a spectacular fall from power, he was expelled not only from the Politburo but also from Moscow, and denied even an apartment back in Baku. He returned to his boyhood home, Nakhichevan, an isolated corner of Azerbaijan, which, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was cut off from the rest of the country by Armenia and was reachable only by occasional air flights from Baku. While in this internal exile, he discovered his new vocation and identity—no longer as a “Soviet man,” but, as he put it, as a “native son.” He bided his time.
With the political battle in Baku getting even hotter and the country teetering on civil war, he returned to the capital city and, in 1993, amid an attempted insurrection, took over as president. At age seventy, Aliyev was back in power. He brought stability. He also brought great skill to the job. “I’ve been in politics a long time, and I’ve seen