The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel

Douglas Brunt's nonfiction narrative traces three generations of the Nobel family, whose industrial empire in Russia rivaled the fortunes of Rockefeller and Rothschild, and examines how that empire was destroyed by Bolshevism, Lenin's radical communist movement, and the ruthless ambitions of Joseph Stalin. The book opens in December 1918 with Emanuel Nobel, the family's third-generation patriarch, walking the streets of Kislovodsk, a resort town in southern Russia where he had taken refuge from the civil war. Stalin's secret police held his two younger half brothers in a Petrograd prison, and the communist government had summoned Emanuel to Moscow. His advisors urged him to flee using forged documents and a peasant disguise. The prologue suspends his decision and rewinds to trace the events that brought the Nobels to this precipice.

In 1837, Immanuel Nobel, Emanuel's grandfather, was a self-taught Swedish inventor facing debtors' prison in Stockholm. He fled to Russia, leaving behind his wife Andriette and three young sons: Robert, Ludvig, and Alfred. After building connections in Finland, Immanuel moved to Saint Petersburg, where he demonstrated an undersea contact mine for military officials. The successful detonation earned him a government contract and enough money to send for his family. During the Crimean War (1853-56), the Nobel foundry delivered hundreds of mines to defend the naval approaches to Saint Petersburg, and the British Royal Navy withdrew without attacking. Russia lost the war on other fronts, and when Tsar Alexander II redirected military spending, the foundry went bankrupt. Immanuel returned to Sweden in 1859, while his three older sons remained in Russia.

Ludvig, the middle brother, founded the Ludvig Nobel Machine Factory in 1862. His son Emanuel was born in 1859. Alfred earned the patent for the blasting cap in 1864, founding the Nitroglycerin Company Ltd.; that same year, an explosion in Alfred's lab killed their youngest brother, Emil, at age 20. Alexander II freed 23 million serfs in 1861 and expanded education, stimulating industrial growth but also creating a discontented urban working class receptive to Karl Marx's revolutionary ideas. In 1866, a revolutionary became the first person to attempt the assassination of a tsar, piercing the aura of the monarchy's invulnerability.

In 1873, Ludvig sent Robert to the Caucasus, the mountainous region between the Black and Caspian Seas, to buy walnut wood for rifle stocks. Robert instead discovered Baku's abundant petroleum and used Ludvig's money to buy oil-rich land and a refinery. After initial frustration, Ludvig recognized the opportunity. In 1876, he and 16-year-old Emanuel traveled to Baku, resolving to build a vertically integrated petroleum business modeled on Rockefeller's Standard Oil. They incorporated Nobel Brothers Petroleum Production Company (Branobel) in 1878. Ludvig designed the world's first oil tanker, the Zoroaster, pioneered continuous distillation, constructed pipelines, and created Villa Petrolea, a landscaped company town for employees. Robert's difficult temperament led to his departure around 1879, leaving leadership to Ludvig and Emanuel.

The Rothschild banking family entered Baku in 1883, investing in the Baku-to-Batum railroad and founding a competing petroleum company. Negotiations between Nobel and Rothschild for a cooperative arrangement repeatedly failed. Standard Oil's representative separately proposed a partnership in 1884, but Ludvig and Emanuel declined. Ludvig died on April 12, 1888, and French newspapers mistakenly reported Alfred's death; the unflattering obituary later motivated Alfred to establish the Nobel Prize. Twenty-eight-year-old Emanuel assumed leadership of the petroleum company and machine factory. In October 1888, he hosted Tsar Alexander III on a tour of the Baku operations; the impressed Tsar offered Emanuel Russian citizenship, which he accepted.

Brunt traces a parallel narrative through the early life of Joseph Stalin, born Ioseb Jughashvili in 1878 in Gori, Georgia. Stalin grew up in poverty with a father who had an alcohol addiction and a resourceful but sometimes abusive mother. He excelled at seminary school but grew rebellious after reading Darwin and banned literature. Expelled in 1899, he joined the socialist underground, organizing strikes and leading a confrontation in Batum in which Cossack troops killed 13 demonstrators. At the 1903 party congress, the Social Democrats split into Lenin's revolutionary Bolsheviks and the reformist Mensheviks, and Stalin aligned with Lenin.

Meanwhile, Emanuel drove Nobel Brothers to record profitability, introducing the Diesel engine to Russia and launching the world's first Diesel-powered tanker. He enforced Alfred's contested will against family opposition to ensure the creation of the Nobel Prize. By 1901, Russian oil production surpassed that of the United States. On January 9, 1905, known as Bloody Sunday, troops fired on 150,000 peaceful workers in Saint Petersburg, killing about 200. Rioters destroyed more than 1,000 oil wells in Baku. Tsar Nicholas II responded with the October Manifesto, establishing an elected legislature called the Duma. Emanuel helped found the moderate Octobrist Party, while Stalin rejected reform, organizing robberies to fund the revolution, including a brazen 1907 bank heist in Tiflis whose proceeds he sent to Lenin.

By the eve of World War I, Emanuel had expanded to four major companies and fended off a hostile takeover by the British-backed Russian General Oil Corporation (RGO). He turned the attack to his advantage by acquiring a large stake in the RGO, gaining control of more than 50 percent of the Russian oil industry. Grigori Rasputin, a Siberian peasant who convinced Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra he could heal their son, who had hemophilia, gained alarming influence over the monarchy. When war erupted in 1914, Emanuel's factories shifted to wartime production. Russia suffered catastrophic losses, and Nicholas II worsened matters by assuming personal command of the army. Conspirators murdered Rasputin in December 1916, but the killing did not restore stability.

In February 1917, bread riots in Petrograd escalated into revolution. Nicholas II abdicated on March 15, and a Provisional Government took power. Lenin returned to Petrograd in April. Leon Trotsky, a revolutionary leader, arrived from New York in May and joined the Bolsheviks. Stalin, released from Siberian exile, had already reached the capital. Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky's decision to continue fighting the war alienated the public, and his suppression of a right-wing counterrevolution inadvertently armed the Bolsheviks. On October 25, 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in a nearly unopposed coup. Lenin censored the press, established the Cheka (a secret police force), and signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russia's participation in the war. On June 20, 1918, he nationalized the Russian oil industry, and one week later nationalized more than 9,500 additional businesses, the largest confiscation of private property in world history. On July 17, Bolshevik guards executed Nicholas II, Alexandra, and their five children.

In October 1918, Emanuel escaped Kislovodsk under forged passports, traveling with his half brother Gösta's wife and children. He reached Stockholm in early December. Stalin ordered the arrest of Emanuel's half brothers Gösta and Emil Nobel in Petrograd. The Swedish government secured their release by threatening retaliation, and the brothers fled across the Finnish border, reuniting with Emanuel for Christmas.

From exile, Emanuel negotiated the sale of Nobel assets as the civil war, which claimed 10 million lives, raged across Russia. In 1920, Standard Oil purchased 50 percent of the Russian holdings for $11.5 million, while Lenin's trade representative simultaneously tried to sell the same assets to Royal Dutch Shell. In 1922, Emanuel gathered these companies in London to form a united front against the Soviet government, the Bolshevik regime now ruling Russia, but Henri Deterding of Royal Dutch Shell broke ranks by purchasing cheap Soviet oil, ending any hope of restitution.

Lenin died on January 21, 1924. Stalin outmaneuvered all rivals for succession and engineered the Holodomor, a deliberate famine in Ukraine (1932-33) that killed an estimated seven to 10 million people. The Soviet regime renamed Nobel Brothers the Soviet Petroleum Company and stripped all evidence of the Nobel name from Baku and Leningrad. Emanuel renounced his Russian citizenship in 1923, settled in Stockholm, and died on May 31, 1932, at age 72. His will named his half brothers as heirs to any Russian assets that might revert to the original owners, a hope never realized. Stalin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 and 1948, an irony underscoring how thoroughly Stalinist revisionism erased the Nobel family's contributions to Russian industry.