Читать книгу Around the Black Sea. Asia Minor, Armenia, Caucasus, Circassia, Daghestan, the Crimea, Roumania онлайн

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Petroleum has been known in the foothills and along the sea coast at the eastern extremity of the Caucasus Mountains from the earliest times.

There is a railway on each side of the Caucasus Mountains. That on the northern side runs from Baku, the oil centre, to the city of Rostov, at the mouth of the river Don and the head of the Sea of Azov. That on the south runs from Batoum to Baku, and is the principal thoroughfare for the shipment of oil to other parts of Europe than Russia. The annual shipments of refined petroleum from Batoum to the rest of the world have averaged about four million barrels, but the Russian refiners cannot compete with the Standard Oil Company, either in the quality or the price of their product. Russian oil has practically been driven out of all the European countries except Turkey, Roumania, Hungary, and Russia, and the Standard Oil Company is now “the Light of Asia” without a rival flame.

At the time of the revolution in Russia in 1905, the employés of both oil companies at Batoum struck. Fifteen hundred men on the Nobel dock, and a thousand more who were working for the other companies, quit work because the new constitution of Russia, as they construed it, granted them liberty to do as they pleased. The oil companies, assuming that they possessed similar rights, closed their warehouses and have never resumed business. After the strikers had enjoyed all of the liberty of this kind they desired, they asked to be taken back, but the operators shook their heads and said there would be no more work for them. Hence the population of Batoum has been reduced by several thousand since that time.