The Russian Rockefellers

The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil Industry

Robert W. Tolf

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780817965860
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Russische Geschichte

The name of Nobel usually calls to mind Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, and the internationally prestigious prizes that bear his name. But Alfred was only one member of a creative and innovative family who built an industrial empire in prerevolutionary Russia. The saga begins with an emigrÉ from Sweden, Immanuel Nobel, who was an architect, a pioneer producer of steam engines, and a maker of armaments, including the underwater mines that were widely used in the Crimean War. Immanuel's sons included Alfred; Robert, who directed the family's activities in the Caspian oil fields; and Ludwig, an engineering genius and manufacturing magnate whose boundless energy and fierce determination created the Russian petroleum industry. Ludwig's son Emanuel showed similar mettle, shrewdly bargaining with the Rothschilds for control of the Russian markets and competing head-on with Standard Oil, Royal Dutch, and Shell for lucrative world markets. Emanuel not only expanded the Russian oil industry but also helped to modernize the Russian navy and commanded a fleet of three hundred ships. Perhaps no family in history has played so decisive a role in building an industrial empire in an underdeveloped but resource-rich nation. Yet the achievements of the Nobel family have been largely forgotten. When the Bolsheviks came to power, the empire, which had taken eighty years to design and build, was nearly destroyed, bringing a sudden and bitter end to one of the most remarkable industrial odysseys in world history.

CHAPTER ONE

The Beginnings

Nobel is associated by most of the civilized world with Sweden, but this most famous name of the north is not an ancient one nor even particularly Swedish-sounding; it dates only from the seventeenth century when a farmer, Olof, added Nobelius to his name. Adoption of surnames, usually inspired by patronymics or nearby places, was the custom of the time and Eastern Nöbbelöv in Skåne, just south of Simrishamn in the southern tip of Sweden, was the name of Olof’s village. Later generations shortened the name to Nobell and then to Nobel, but did little to distinguish themselves or to provide significant indications of the genius that would later burst forth. Petrus Olavi Nobelius was a lawyer, his son an artist who painted miniatures, and a grandson an army doctor. Others remained on the farm as Nobels had done for centuries, long before they had a family name. None displayed that spark of genius. There were no brief flashes of fire, no rumbling portents of the volcanoes of creative energy and enterprise which later erupted. But there was Olof Rudbeck.

A man of the Renaissance at seventeenth-century Upsala University, Rudbeck was Sweden’s first natural scientist and he made important advances in man’s knowledge of the circulatory system. He founded the school of music, organized the country’s first botanical garden, and composed that phantasy of Swedish romantic nationalism, Atlantis. Architect and administrator, scientist and musician, he combined great creative imagination with solid practical skills. He also married his daughter to Petrus Olavi Nobelius. But the Rudbeck genes of genius then lay dormant for more than a century until 1801 and the birth of Immanuel Nobel.

Immanuel had limited primary education and, as was the common custom for young Swedish males not hound to the farm, at age fourteen went to sea. When he returned three years later he apprenticed himself to a local builder who, among other projects, was erecting a triumphal arch for the reception ceremony welcoming the country’s new king, Karl Johan. Immanuel enrolled in Stockholm’s Academy of Art and studied architecture under the tutelage of the city’s most popular master. He then attended a mechanical school where he was awarded the highest honors for his drawings and models—a wind-driven pump, a spiral staircase, storage towers, linen-finishing machinery. The year he completed his formal education he married Caroline Andrietta Ahlsell, filed patent applications for a planing machine, a ten-roller mangle, and a mechanical driving gear, and launched his career as architect-builder. He successfully negotiated contracts for construction of a bridge and renovation of several houses. But the patents were rejected and he suffered serious financial reverses in his other endeavors. When three barges of building materials destined for one of his projects sank in the deep waters of the archipelago, the Swedish career of Immanuel Nobel, Master Builder, came to an abrupt end.

Only his marriage brought him some measure of success. Andrietta was a perfect counterpoint to the demanding, temperamental Immanuel. Her humor in the face of adversity, her strength and great forbearance marked her as a true descendant of solid Småland peasant stock, a daughter from that southern Swedish province where the farmers scratched in stony soil for a bare and meager existence. Her patience, endurance—even her faith in her husband—were sorely tested during those first years of marriage as one after another of Immanuel’s dreams turned into nightmares and they moved from house to house on the outskirts of Stockholm, needing but not being able to afford larger quarters for their growing family. First came Robert Hjalmar in 1829, and two years later Ludwig Immanuel. The sickly and fragile Alfred Bernhard was born in 1833 just ten months after his father had declared bankruptcy.

The previous year a fire had destroyed most of their home and possessions. Immanuel, still faced with the debts from his abandoned building projects, saw no alternative to the humiliation of declaring himself bankrupt. But he refused to be discouraged or defeated. He was determined to find practical applications for some of those ideas that never seemed to stop swirling in his head. He managed to find the backing—he could be as persuasive as he was inventive—to open a small rubber factory, Sweden’s first, and he manufactured various elastic cloths as well as surgical and military supplies. He also developed an ingenious rubber backpack for the army. Fully inflatable, the Nobel knapsack was designed to be used as an air mattress, a life jacket, and as a section of a pontoon bridge.

Immanuel fabricated prototypes, submitted descriptions and cost estimates to the Swedish military, but he was unable to arouse any enthusiasm. The army was in no mood to experiment, to expand, or to spend money. He received the same negative reaction when he proposed development of a far more dramatic idea: subsurface charges of gunpowder to destroy an enemy on land or sea. Immanuel was thinking of underwater and underground mines. He had accurately assessed their defensive value and was hoping to interest the military in a research program to test his various schemes for detonation, to perfect a safe and secure means of manufacturing and then handling the mines. It was the beginning of the Nobel family’s fascination with explosives.

The immediate inspiration for Immanuel’s interest in the subject of mine warfare, in developing explosive charges that could be detonated from what he termed “a considerable distance” to destroy advancing armies or ships of the line, is not at all clear. Surely he was no stranger to the sea; he had spent his youth in the coastal town of Gävle a hundred miles north of Stockholm, and three years on the high seas as a young sailor. Nor was he a stranger to the army; his father had served as regimental barber-surgeon, and through his own efforts to sell various rubber supplies to the military he had been in frequent contact with both line and staff officers. As architect he had been exposed to the problems of digging into the earth for foundation construction, drilling and blasting into rock. And he may have been aware of mine warfare experiments in other countries.

Immanuel was not the first to consider the potential or to develop working prototypes. During the American Revolution a young Yale student, after an unsuccessful effort with a hand-propelled one-man submarine, assembled a number of waterproof powder-filled minibarrels, setting them afloat on the Delaware River in the hope they would explode on contact with British men-of-war.¹ It is not considered likely that Immanuel ever heard of that quixotic episode or of Francis Hopkinson’s revolutionary ballad based on the event, “The Battle of the Kegs,” but he might have been informed about the experiments of another American thirty years later.

Robert Fulton developed several workable mines and demonstrated them to the Dutch, the French, the British, and finally to his own country’s military. Napoleon favored the idea and 10,000 francs were committed for an 1801 demonstration. It was a success, but the French military rejected further development on the grounds that mine warfare was morally indefensible. Three years later a British commission came to the same conclusion. But when Fulton returned to the U.S. he managed to win a $5,000 congressional appropriation for testing what he and the next generation always referred to as “torpedoes,” an English version of the French transliteration of the Latin term for the family of electric rays. Fulton’s new weapon was not utilized by the Americans in the War of 1812 against the British nor at any time during the next half-century, despite the efforts of an enterprising Connecticut Yankee, Samuel Colt, who fabricated an electrically-detonated mine controlled by an observer some distance away.² It was not until the Civil War that the potential of naval mine warfare was finally realized in the United States and it was then the Confederacy which showed the way, promoting at least one Union admiral into immortality—it was Farragut who gave the famous command when confronted by Confederate mines at Mobile Bay: “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

By that time Immanuel already had perfected a series of his own sophisticated mines and the world’s military strategists were awakening to the potential of mine warfare; but in Sweden of the 1830s, Immanuel was alone in recognizing the value of the new weapon and when the government failed to grant funds for research and development he was forced to put his mine ideas aside, to file them away with that scheme for inflatable knapsacks. There were other projects—Immanuel never lacked inspiration and inventiveness—and his rubber factory was proving more successful than his building endeavors had been. But financial security continued to elude him and creditors continued to hound him. In an agricultural country in which poverty was thought to be a national characteristic, Immanuel was beginning to believe that he would not have the chance to make the kind of success he felt could and would be his with the proper opportunities.

His frustration was undoubtedly not a unique phenomenon in Stockholm at the time, but Immanuel Nobel was never one to let frustration block his path or force him to a resigned acceptance of fate. When he met a visiting Russian emissary at a party in Stockholm, he was suddenly confronted by a crossroads where he saw that chance, where he found another opportunity, another new arena to seek fame and fortune.

Lars Gabriel von Haartman, a Russian-Finnish official who was later made a baron, arrived in Stockholm in the spring of 1837 to negotiate for the Russian government a trade and friendship treaty with Sweden. Haartman lived in Åbo (Turku); more, he was governor of that coastal town of thirteen thousand and head of a city commission to encourage trade and agriculture. On meeting Immanuel and listening to the young Swede’s schemes and dreams he encouraged him to move to the Baltic outpost of the tsar’s northern empire and to take up residence in Åbo. Haartman had important contacts in Finland and in St. Petersburg, and he promised he would introduce Immanuel to the right people both inside and outside government. He seemed as confident as Nobel that the Swedish architect-inventor would make a great success in the Finnish town.

The decision was as difficult as any Immanuel would ever make, for he had to leave Andrietta and their three sons behind. Conditions for his family in an unknown and untried area would not be any better—at least initially—than they were in Stockholm. For Immanuel, who had been struggling through a decade to make a decent living in Sweden, conditions could not be much worse. On the fourth day of December 1837, with family waving farewell on the Stockholm docks and Immanuel suppressing reluctance with hope and determination that must have bordered on the desperate, he sailed out of the harbor and headed for Finland and fortune. It was the first leg of a journey that would be taken dozens of times by Nobels in the course of the next eighty years.

The day after his arrival in Abo Immanuel called on Haartman and the governor, true to his word, saw that he met the most influential people in the city. During the next twelve months Nobel apparently justified the Finn’s faith in him as he continued with his experiments and designed and built several houses, including one for the wealthy Scharlin family who had warmly received him as a lodger. The house at Nylandsgatan 8 still stands, a two-storied stone classical structure with balcony and Corinthian pillars breaking the severity of the lines. Immanuel also promoted his several rubber products and, with Haartman so well connected at court and within the hierarchy of the Russian Ministry of War, he no doubt continued to work on his mines.

This was probably the reason he decided to make another move after a year in Åbo. The Russian military was a vast state enterprise with procurement contracts running into the millions and with active programs in weapons research and development. There was no guarantee that Immanuel would ever see any of that money, but he was confident of his abilities and—with the aid of those Russian officials he had met through Haartman—he was certain of at least some measure of government interest. The decision to seek once again a new land to the east was far less difficult than the one made a year earlier.

In December 1838 he arrived in the-city created by Peter the Great on the marshes of a former Swedish province. Immanuel was probably the first Nobel to set foot on Russian soil although his father’s brother, Petrus Nobelius, might have been there as a soldier during the ill-fated campaign against Catherine the Great—Sweden’s last attempt to drive the Russians from the sea and to reestablish its eastern Baltic outposts.

It was not too unusual for a Swede to make the short and inexpensive trip to Peter’s city, to seek employment in Russia—especially in Petersburg, noted for a century as a haven welcoming pioneers and those eager to make their fortunes in trade, commerce, or industry in Russia’s greatest port. Ever since Peter’s decree in 1702 granting guarantees and concessions to the foreigner, the Russian window to the west had attracted adventurers, entrepreneurs, and investors. With certain changes in the ground rules, this encouragement has remained through the years a dominant factor in the economic development of the country.

The Vikings had shown the way. Their centuries-long search for plunder and commerce had swept a Scandinavian presence to the steppes of Asia, across the great rivers of Russia—the Volga, the Don, the Dnieper—to the shores of the Caspian and Black seas and all the way to Byzantium which the Vikings named the Great City and served as its imperial bodyguard. The ninth-century Nestor Chronicle relates the tradition that it was the Slavs, unable to govern themselves, who invited the men of the north—whom they called “Rus”—to rule them; those men Arab chroniclers described as “tall as palm trees, rosy-cheeked and with red hair,” always armed with axe, dagger, and sword, with coarse cloaks thrown over one shoulder and with one arm always free to do battle.³

Near the area which Peter chose as site for his new capital the Vikings had a settlement, Staraja Ladoga, where they transshipped products for the voyage down the Russian rivers, where they rested and prepared for the labor of pulling their long ships on rollers over the watersheds and down to the Dnieper and the Volga. It was the area of major Swedish concern; the eastern Baltic was once considered a Swedish lake, the waterway to their own gates. Looking to the west and to the south for political and economic inspiration and models, Sweden could not ignore the happenings in the east, the developments in the land of the tsars. For centuries the Swedish kings—Gustavus Adolphus, Charles XII, and finally Gustav III—sought security in the east by conquering Russian armies and by erecting their own fortifications on the flanks of the empire.

From the time of the Vikings to the time of the Nobels there were thousands of Swedes who, in an endless repetition of war and commerce, fought, plundered, traded, and settled in Russia. Swedish technicians were employed by the tsars; Swedish metal workers and gunsmiths laid the foundations of an armaments industry; a Swede established the first glassworks; Swedish prisoners of war were used by Peter to cut a three-mile path through the forest for his great boulevard in the heart of his new city. At the end of that wide expanse, the Nevsky Prospekt, Peter built the cathedral and monastery to house the relics of Russia’s medieval hero, Alexander Nevsky, who had beaten the Swedes five hundred years earlier. Other Swedish prisoners were sent to Siberia where they remade the capital city of Tobolsk, building a fortress and introducing the art of brickmaking.⁴

The Swedish presence and influence, the Russian remembrance of the threat, the memorials to the victories, were profound. The three hundred cannon of the fortress of Peter and Paul, that brick and marble enlargement of Peter’s first humble fort of clay and wood, all faced Sweden. The city itself was founded as a bastion of defense during the Great Northern War, an enclave guarding Russia’s newly-won access to the Baltic. The Golden Fountain in the grand promenade of that Russian version of Versailles known as Peterhof (now Petrodvorets) is not only a dramatic representation of the Samson-and-lion legend; it is also symbolic of Russia’s victory over Sweden. Under the hooves of the Bronze Horseman, Petersburg’s finest statue and the subject of Pushkin’s finest poem, is a snake. The horseman is Peter the Great and the snake is Sweden.

The tradition of contact and confrontation was there, and a Swedish traveler in the mid-nineteenth century had no difficulty finding other Swedes. A Stockholm-published guidebook listed the directions to the Swedish church of St. Katarina along with information on the Russian, German, and French theaters at the Hermitage and the locations of two coffeehouses, Wolf and Beranger’s by the Police Bridge and Dominique’s by Peter’s Church.⁵ Then, too, the Swedish émigré had the comfort of knowing that he would be in a similar climate, one with short summers and dreary, relentless winters. On the city’s outskirts there was the solace of the silent woods, so similar to those in his native land: groves of spruce, fir, and the beloved birch which the old Russians believed sheltered the souls of their ancestors. In the city were canals and rivers—Petersburg, like Stockholm, was built on a series of islands and was for many travelers of the time the true sister city of the Swedish capital.

For an artist, for an architect, it was an open-air museum with the monuments of Europe’s architectural genius on display throughout the city. To Immanuel it was at once a postgraduate course and an overwhelming, humbling experience. How could a provincial from a small country hope to compete with the glories of design all around him? The monuments by Peter’s great architect, the Italian-Swiss Trezzini, with his university, that modest Dutch-style Summer Palace, the Germanic Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul, the domed Cathedral of the Annunciation; the German Schädel’s Menshikov Palace built at Peter’s command for the former stableboy whom he made the first governor of the city; the German Mattarnovy’s Anthropological Museum; the Swiss Thomon’s Greek temple of a bourse; the romantic-classical style of the Russian Zakharov’s Admiralty; the neoclassicism of the Italian Quarenghi’s Academy of Sciences; Rossi’s Senate and Synod; the baroque of Rastrelli’s Stroganov Palace, the Smolny Monastery, and the Winter Palace just then rebuilding after a disastrous five-day fire the previous year; the French Monferran’s Cathedral of St. Isaac and his countryman’s Academy of Fine Arts; the gardens and buildings of Peterhof, designed by the Frenchman François LeBlond, chief architect of the city. It probably was not too difficult for Immanuel to determine that his future would be more promising if he forgot architecture and concentrated on minemaking, manufacturing, and development of his other inventions.

Within a few days after his arrival in Petersburg he had the chance to discuss that future, to explain his own ideas on mine warfare. At a reception given by one of Haartman’s friends he overheard two of the guests discussing an experiment, a demonstration scheduled to take place the following day. One of the men was General Karl Andreyevich Schilder, the other a former professor of architec...