The artificial island of Neftyanye Kamni or “Oily Rocks” is in a very bad state. “Unbelievable. I have never seen anything like it. It is like a photo dating of the 194Os”, says a Texan from Pennzoil, the US oil company that built and exploits a gas compression and processing station, the only “normal” unit on Oily Rocks. This artificial island built with Soviet technology that dates back to the 1940s, suffers from a disease that rages in all the former republics of the Soviet Union: total lack of maintenance. It is a disease which has turned so many of these installations into industrial graveyard.

A total lack of maintenance.

The artifical island of “Neftyanye Kamni”, a unique installation, is actually a huge network of some 70 kilometers of causeways built on steel tubes above the sea. Trucks and crane traverse the causeways which link a number of platforms and some 4.000 wells.

In the centre of this huge steel spider’s web, the central platform, where the first well was drilled in 1949 by a worker called Mikail Kaverotchkine, looks like a miniature city. It supports several buildings each with multiple floors. In addition it houses a power station, processing plants, an administrative centre, and two buildings which provide a temporary home for the more than 1,000 men and women who work an intensive eight days shift before leaving the artificial island for a week of on-shore rest and recuperation. A bronze effigy of the pioneer worker who built the first well, sits alongside other statues and frescoes glorifying the workers of times gone by, especially those active in the last decade of Staline’s rule -- when the Soviet leadership in Moscow patronized an Azerbaidjan Republic which produced one third of all oil extracted in the USSR.

Those days are quite over. Seriously damaged in 1992 by a particularly violent storm, the installations of the artificial island show the strains of a terrible neglect that has been going on for at least 15 years. Most installations look as though they were destroyed by war rather than by a storm. Half destroyed buildings, gaping tanks, cranes that look like sculptures made of rust. Employees of the national oil company, SOCAR, looking more like hobos or tramps than professional oilmen with their shabby clothes and unshaven faces, pay scant regard to safery measures, there are no hard hats in evidence. However, it must be said that safety clothing is not made available by SOCAR and with salaries of only 300.000 manats, or just over $60 a month, workers are understandably reluctant to buy their own, especially when even this small salary is frequently delayed for months.

In striking contrast to all this dereliction is the platform of Pennzoil, an American oil company based in Houston, Texas. The workers on this platform wear impeccable uniforms complete with two-coloured safety helmets. The turbines of the compression station gleam. Although the workers on the Pennzoil platform are paid only 20.000 manats ($4,5) a month more than their colleagues at the national company, they are paid regularly and on time. Producing 3,5 million cubic meters of gas a day, the Pennzoil unit meets about 20 per cent of Azerbaijan’s total needs, thus saving as much as $250.000 a day on natural gas imports. Astonishingly all the gas collected and compressed by Pennzoil was previously allowed to simply escape in the atmosphere. The technicians responsible for the design and contruction of Oily Rock island did not even make provision for the gas to be flared.

The industrial cemetery of Sumgait.

Unfortunately Neftyanye Kamni is not exceptional in this. Some 30 kilometres north of Baku is the industrial city of Sumgait, which boasts a concentratation of refineries and various metallurgical and petrochemical industries. It is an industrial cemetery. Pollution is severe, in spite of the fact that several factories which used to operate in the area are now closed down and most of the ones that are still operational are working at only around 20 per cent of their capacity.

A scene of industrial scarring.

Everywhere in Azerbaijan the scene is one of industrial scarring. A once busy suburb known as “The 40 Tanks”, situated just outside the capital is now reduced to a number of mostly deserted factories set alongside refugee-built shanties of plastic, wood and corrugated iron. Forty year old Elena, used to work in one of the town’s now-delapidated textile factory as an an engineer. She recalls “the happy days” of Soviet rule when there was work and regular wages, then she could afford all the things she wanted: a car, long since sold, trips to the cinema and holidays in Crimea or Leningrad. Now, there is no industry, only silent factories, dusty abandoned offices and widespread unemployment. Elena’s husband, an economist, also unemployed, was grateful to secure a job as a car park attendant at the airport. He makes about 250.000 manats ($55) a month with tips.

Nuri Nuriev, the 62 year old chief engineer at the artificial island of Neftyanye Kamni, has a theory about the total breakdown of Azeri industry. In the “good old Soviet days”, he explains, “everything was coordinated from the oil ministry in Moscow. It was the ministry that supplied all the spare parts and equipement to ensure eveything ran smoothly”, the chief engineer recalls. “We drew up a list of our needs six months or a year in advance and officials from the company would go to Moscow with a plan including projected figures for extraction. We would explain to directors at the ministry that without the spare parts we would not be able to fulfill the plan. They would provide us with what we required”.

“Now”, Nuri Nuriev continued, “we must buy everything with hard currencies either in Russia or elsewhere. We do have workshops capable of making some spare parts but 30 % of the raw materials used come from abroad and we have no money to buy them. Production is paralysed”.

Elena, the former textile factory engineer, underlines another problem. The bulk of goods produced by the factories in Azerbaijan were aimed at markets in the former republics of the Soviet Union. With independence these “captive” markets largely dried up. Moreover the quality of the products produced in Azerbaijan is not comparable with the quality of imported products. “The quality of shirts and trousers we are able to produce is poor”, says Elena. “They sell badly because the shops now also contain imported products of much higher quality”.

Another reason for the deserted appearance of former commercial centres which is seldom referred to is the departure of several hundred thousand professional and managerial cadres who left the country after the “death”, as they describe it in Baku, of the USSR. After the pogroms of Sumgait (February 1988) and of Baku (January 1990) practically all the Armenians left the country. Of roughly half a million Armenians living in Azerbaijan ten years ago, less than 30.000, mainly women of Armenian descent married to Azeris and elderly people without relatives, remain. And most of those clandestinely. It is estimated that as many as 300.000 Russians also left after the declaration of independence on 29 August 1991. Worse yet was the departure of large number of people of Azeri descent, educated and trained in the Russian mould, who also opted to quit the country for a new life in Moscow. Little wonder those who remain are demoralised. These orphans of the Soviet system struggle on in the midst of incredible material difficulties.

Plagued with the burden of several hundred thousand refugees - victims of the conflict with Armenia - coping with an industrial production rate which is 30% down on 1994 and with a legal minimum monthly salary equivalent to just $1,25 Azerbaijan is on the brink of implosion.

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