Marvin Kalb - The Year I Was Peter the Great - 1956 - Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia

The sergeant, on his own, then called the hotel, learned officially of my diplomatic status, informed his superior, and, his lower lip trembling, told me that he was sorry and hoped that I would return to Bukhara. I assured him I would. At which point, my Intourist guide reappeared, rushed me into a waiting taxicab, which took us first to the hotel, where I recovered my passport and my bag, and then to the airport, where I caught my flight to Tashkent, but with not much time to spare.

Central Asia had been interesting and, on occasion, even compelling, but I was happy to leave. Because of Intourist’s uniquely idiotic way of arranging a travel schedule, I knew I would have to spend the whole afternoon and evening in Tashkent before my 1:35 a.m. flight to Baku—again, why 1:35 a.m., and not 1:35 p.m., a more reasonable hour?

I decided to attend a play— Sixth Floor , an amusing French production, even if translated into Russian—and I enjoyed three chance conversations. In Theater Square I met a Volga German. Since the outbreak of World War II, he had been forced to live an exile’s life in a small town on the Chinese border. Now, in the wake of de-Stalinization, he could move to Tashkent, but not back to the Volga region, where his family had lived since the time of the Catherine the Great, who had invited German colonizers to the area. He volunteered, without my asking, that in his judgment 60 percent of Volga Germans would return to Germany if given the chance.

I encountered a Jewish man from Kiev, who had been living in Tashkent since 1942. He operated a small shoe-repair booth—too small to be described as a store. He told me, “Here in Tashkent we all envy the baker. At least, he’s got his loaf of bread.” He estimated that 80 percent of European Jews living in central Asia would leave the Soviet Union, if given the chance. Most would go to Israel. He looked unhappy. After polishing my shoes, he held my hand and whispered, “Don’t ever forget us.”

At the airport I met a young Korean history teacher, a Soviet citizen born in Tashkent. When he learned that I had once taught Russian history, he said, beaming, “We historians share one thing: We both speak the truth. We both seek the truth.” The first topic on his agenda was how African Americans were treated in the United States. That was no surprise. The subject came up often, especially with Soviet citizens who were members of the Communist Party. I told him that after a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision banning segregation in state schools, the last barrier to genuine equality between the races had been blasted away. I said, “The issue of racial prejudice was a live issue only in some southern states. I think in time the issue will lose its significance even in those states.” (How wrong I was!)

He asked me, “Do you think true freedom exists in the Soviet Union?”

I responded, “No, in my judgment, it does not,” and added, “Communism has become a bloodless ideology, and it will wither away in time.” (How right I was!)

“But we have elections, free and secret, just as you do,” he said. “How then can you say that we do not have freedom at least equal to yours?”

I told him that where there was no choice, there was no freedom.

“I thought you would say that,” he said, “and, you know, I can’t help but agree with you. Our freedom is a paper freedom.” He looked around, wondering, I guess, whether he had been talking too much.

I was left with the impression from my visit to central Asia that de-Stalinization had had only a limited impact on the people. Life had eased a bit, but it had not really changed. I suspected I would find that it had had a much deeper impact on the people living in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, Stalin’s birthplace.

Bukhara was hot and dry. Baku was hot and humid, certainly on the day I got there. It was like Washington in mid-August. From the moment the plane door opened, I could feel the moist heat rushing in, and this mix of heat and humidity dogged me during my stay in Baku, the capital and commercial hub of Azerbaijan, then one of the fifteen Soviet republics. Intourist had assured me that “Baku” meant “city of winds,” and the temperature would never climb higher than 78.

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 oil: 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.