No Loaded Guns in Class

Thomas de Waal

• Ali and Nino by Kurban Said, translated by Jenia Graman
  Vintage, 237 pp, £6.99, October 2000, ISBN 0 09 928322 0

Oil production in Baku on the Caspian Sea began in the late 19th century and within a few years the city had become the wealthiest in the Russian Empire, producing more oil than the United States. Immigrants flooded in, turning a desert town in Azerbaijan with a population of 14,500 in 1872 into a metropolis of 143,000 inhabitants by 1903. The newcomers included Nobels and Rothschilds and thousands of poor Jews attracted by the possibility of freedoms they didn’t have in the rest of Russia. Poor Muslim farmers became millionaires when oil was discovered on their land. A small-scale cultural renaissance followed, bankrolled by the new millionaires, and in 1907 the new Baku theatre proudly showed the ‘first opera of the Islamic East’, Uzeir Hajibeyli’s Leyla and Majnun. For a time it seemed as though East and West were in fertile union.