In 1905 a British journalist called James Dodds Henry travelled to Baku, an enclave on the southern frontier of the Russian Empire that had recently become the centre of the world oil industry. 'If oil is king, Baku is its throne,' he wrote in Baku: An Eventful History. But the Russian industry was even then beginning a precipitous decline following a series of crippling strikes in the oilfields led by a young Joseph Stalin, and rebellion was spreading across the Caucasus. Dodds wrote of the waves of 'inter-racial savagery' between Muslim Tatars and Armenian Christians that had laid waste to the refineries and the surrounding boom town.

LRB 17 December 2009 | PDF Download