The Russian Rockefellers

“Ludwig Nobel, after a highly successful career as a St. Petersburg manufacturer, literally created the Russian oil industry which in turn fueled the tremendous economic expansion of prerevolutionary Russia. He designed the world’s first oil tanker and had a dozen in regular service before other nations followed his lead; he installed Europe’s first pipelines and put the first tankcars on its rails; he built the world’s first full-scale continuous distillation refinery and developed oil burners to utilize more efficiently the black gold pouring from the world’s first gushers; he forged a gigantic infrastructure on water and land, overcoming native inertia and a stubborn opposition, building a network of storage depots and tank farms, harbors, freightyards, and marketing outlets from one end of the vast Russian empire to the other and then across the European continent and into the British Isles.”

“Ludwig’s father before him pioneered development of underwater mines, designed some of the first steam engines to power Russian ships, and installed the first central heating systems to warm Russian homes. Ludwig’s son after him launched the world’s first diesel-driven tugs and tankers while bargaining with the Rothschilds, struggling against Royal Dutch-Shell, and bartering with Standard Oil in Europe’s second Thirty Years War, a petroleum war for control of world markets.”

“During their eighty years in Russia the Nobels and their band of Scandinavian expatriates were industrial miracle makers in a primitive land. They built armament factories in the wilds of northern Russia, expanded a small St. Petersburg machine shop and foundry into one of the largest enterprises in the country, developed and marketed the Nobel wheel—the Michelin of its time—devised new tools and procedures for assembly-line production, exhibiting in all their undertakings an active and continuing concern for their workers’ welfare—as unique a concern in Russia at the time as it was in the rest of the world.”

“They abolished child labor and shortened work hours, while establishing workers’ savings banks and a system of regular wage payments without resort to the standard and iniquitous system of fines for real or imagined transgressions. Their fifty thousand workers felt a special loyalty and pride in being identified as “Nobelites.””

“It was commonly said in Russia that among the two hundred oil barons of Baku only ten were honest: Nobel, an Armenian, and eight Moslems.”

“The Nobel Brothers Petroleum Company was the innovator and the leader: the others followed, first in the empire and then in Europe and in Asia.”

“At the turn of the century Russia was supplying more than half the world’s oil, but the troubles of 1903–1906 marked the end of that leadership and spelled defeat for Nobel, Rothschild, and the other Russian producers in the Thirty Years War.”

“By 1916 Nobel owned, controlled, or had substantial interest in companies producing a third of all Russian crude oil, 40 percent of all the refined, and supplying almost two-thirds of domestic consumption. There were more than four hundred tank farms and depots flying the Nobel banner and the company commanded the largest private fleet in the world.”

“Two years later Emanuel was fleeing the country disguised as a peasant, his two brothers were in a Cheka prison, the Nobel empire was a shambles, the ships halted, the refinery fires banked, the hundreds of wells filling with water, the factories in St. Petersburg closed down.”

“It was a time when promoters traded pharmaceuticals for priceless art at bargain basement prices, when wheeler-dealers squirmed to secure exclusive exploitation rights, when bankers and industrialists circumvented their own governments’ regulations in the rush to gain concessions.”

“Development and Exploitation of Oil and Gas Fields”

“*Zoroaster,* the world’s first oil tanker.”

“*Vandal,* the world’s first diesel tank barge.”