The Rise and Fall of the Caspian Sea

Text by Robert Cullen

On a clear, warm Sunday last autumn Jamshid Khalilov, a 22-year-old student at the Azerbaijan State Oil Academy, rose early to study. Jamshid lives on the third floor of a dormitory a mile [1.6 kilometers] from the Caspian Sea in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku. In Baku Bay oil derricks spike the horizon like dead trees, and the water seems to carry a gray, viscous film.

Jamshid is a pleasant, earnest young man, slightly built, with a blunt, square face and the dark eyes characteristic of most Azerbaijanis. He wore a thin sport shirt, Reebok warm-up pants, and shower clogs when I visited him, unannounced. He insisted that I take the lone chair in the room while I asked my questions. Jamshid said he had been studying English for five years, but his fluency was limited, so we conversed in Russian, his second language.

“As a boy I wanted to be a doctor,” he said. “But then I decided there were better opportunities in oil.” In 1994 he enrolled in the oil academy, a state school housed in an aging building near the Baku railway station. The student stipend is only [the equivalent of] four [U.S.] dollars a month, so he worked the overnight shift in a cafeteria, which provided him with some extra money, hot food, and a cot to sleep on when he could snatch an hour of rest.

Jamshid studied in a time of high expectations and rapid change for Baku and the Caspian region, expectations and change caused by oil. The Caspian in the ’90s is like an old, once wealthy city neighborhood gone to seed and then suddenly rediscovered and made fashionable again by a new generation of gentrifiers. It’s hot.

Oil is not a new discovery here; Marco Polo noted its abundance 700 years ago. Oil and related natural gas lie under the Caspian waters and shore in two zones, one extending from Baku east toward Turkmenistan and the other westward from Kazakhstan under the waters of the northern end of the sea. What is new is the politics of the Caspian. Three new littoral states—Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan—have emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union and invited the world to share in what was once a Russian monopoly.

It’s still not clear how much oil is left in the Caspian basin. Some estimates suggest there is nearly 200 billion barrels, roughly as much as the proven reserves of Iran and Iraq combined. Actual production in the region is far more modest—about 1.1 million barrels a day, or 1.5 percent of the world’s total. But booms are based on potential, and the Caspian’s potential has made it a kind of ingenue in world politics, courted by distant governments and corporations. The region has begun to matter in world politics and to matter for more than its traditional claims to fame: caviar and the largest inland body of water in the world. It has become a place that arouses hope in the mind of a young man like Jamshid Khalilov.

Jamshid came to Baku from Gäncä, a city in the Azerbaijani hinterlands. His father, an engineer, worked in a metals factory. But since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the factory had all but ceased to operate. His father remained on the payroll, earning only [the equivalent of] about [U.S.] $20 a month—barely enough for a daily loaf of bread. So Jamshid was on his own.

He was starting from conditions as dispiriting as the soiled sea around Baku. The courtyard of his dormitory is littered with broken glass and, on the morning I visited, hundreds of shiny yellow peanut packages festooned with a cartoon of Superman. Refugee children from Azerbaijan’s still unsettled conflict with Armenia played soccer amid the debris. Their families have been squeezed in among the students, straining the dormitory’s already meager capacity to provide basic services or a quiet place to study. There is no heat in winter. Water generally runs only for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. The floorboards in the halls are rotting away. The stench from the communal toilets is always present.

Jamshid shares his room with two other students. They sleep on iron cots with creaking springs. Flies buzz about. Wallpaper peels from the walls, and boards have been mounted in empty window frames, shutting out the wind. There is a single table and a hot plate in the corner.

The room offers a sharp contrast to the changes that have been visible to Jamshid on the streets of Baku in recent years. Shortly after independence, cosmetic changes began to occur. The Cyrillic alphabet the Soviets had imposed on Azerbaijan’s Turkic language was replaced by a Latin variant. The red banners exhorting Azerbaijanis to fulfill the plans of the last party congress disappeared from the streets. Marlboro billboards went up, exhorting them to smoke like cowboys. Baku entered a period of what might be called kiosk capitalism. Small traders opened sidewalk booths or hole-in-the-wall stores, selling things like cigarettes, vodka, candy bars, tomatoes, and sausages. Then came an overlapping era of ersatz capitalism. Small entrepreneurs, many of them Turkish, opened copies of Western consumer outlets. On one corner in downtown Baku, a restaurant called Pizza Hat faces a “Polo” store that sells knockoffs of Ralph Lauren sportswear called, inscrutably, Polo-Garage.

The biggest changes took place in the mid-1990s, after Western oil companies signed a series of joint-venture deals with the Azerbaijani government. Baku entered an era of showcase capitalism. Mercedes-Benz opened a dealership on the seaside boulevard still called Oil Workers’ Prospekt. Hyatt opened a hotel. Irish bars and a Cajun restaurant opened for expatriate oil workers. New buildings of glass and granite sprouted here and there on the grimy, crumbling Baku skyline. They stood out like a man wearing a tuxedo in a soup kitchen line. Much of the city still lacked regular running water, but there were more and more BMWs on the streets above the leaking pipes.

Not much of this new money, the down payment on promised billions, trickled down to the average Azerbaijani. But some did. Hikmet Islamov, a 1986 graduate of the oil academy, went to work for the Azerbaijan International Operating Company (AIOC), the first and biggest of the joint ventures between Azerbaijan and foreign companies. Islamov spent a year in Houston, training with engineers at Brown & Root, a participant in the joint venture along with 11 oil companies, chief among them BP Amoco. He picked up a taste for Turnbull & Asser shirts and a sense of how Western economies operate. Back in Azerbaijan he rose through the AIOC ranks to become manager of the oil terminal at Sangasal, south of Baku. “By the time I am 50,” he told me, “I expect to be a vice president. Minimum.”

The AIOC’s public relations officials took pains to publicize success stories like Islamov’s. They wanted the Azerbaijani public to know about them, to feel that local boys and girls had a chance in the new dispensation.

And so Jamshid Khalilov permitted himself to dream a little. He thought it would be nice to have enough money to court a girlfriend, a pleasure beyond his means at present. He thought that sometime in the future, he would like to have a house, a car, a family, and a vacation abroad once in a while. “My parents have never had a house, or a car, or a chance to travel,” he told me.

But going after that better life was an intimidating thought. In the Soviet era students bore little responsibility for their futures. They were sucked up by the system in a practice called, in Russian, raspredyelyeniye, or “assignment.” The state determined where their talents were needed. The state sent them there.

To get a job with the AIOC, Jamshid would have to meet the requirements of another culture, to pass an interview and a written exam. On average one applicant in ten is accepted. Those who are rejected must take whatever work they can find. Jamshid knows recent graduates of the academy who are waiting on tables and driving cabs. “You have to be strong not to be afraid,” Jamshid told me. “Now they pick only the most capable.”

A year before the end of his studies at the academy, Jamshid applied for a job. He could always, he knew, finish his degree in part-time study if he succeeded. He recalled vividly the atmosphere he encountered at the AIOC. Carpet covered the floors. Art hung on the walls. People spoke quietly and politely to one another. They dressed well. Everyone’s desk had a computer.

It was, Jamshid recalled, “another world.”

He had an interview. Then he sat down to take the written exam that would help determine whether he could enter that world.

Had Jamshid known a woman named Sara Ashurbeili, living not far from him in Baku, he might have been more skeptical of the chances that an oil boom would bring permanent prosperity to the Caspian. Sara Ashurbeili, who was 90 when I spoke with her, remembers the end of an earlier oil boom.

Before the first Texas gushers, back when Arabia’s major resource was thought to be dates, the Caspian was rich with petroleum. Marco Polo wrote of “a fountain from which oil springs in great abundance.” So bountifully was the area endowed that toward the end of the last century the problem was not finding oil but figuring out what to do with it once it exploded from the ground. Wildcatters with tools little more sophisticated than ropes and shovels could strike a “fountain” that would burst hundreds of feet in the air and spew oil for days until a way could be found to cap it.

Such fountains made Baku a boomtown in the 1870s. The city retains vestiges of this era, mansions with carved portals that once housed oil barons’ families. One of them is a handsome limestone building where the letter “A” is still visible in an elaborate wrought-iron design over the gate to the courtyard. This was Sara Ashurbeili’s childhood home.

Stooped and white-haired, Sara now lives several blocks away with two sisters in a two-room apartment that smells of cats. Streaks of rust run down the concrete walls outside. “My father was a Baku oil millionaire,” she said when I asked her to tell me about her memories. “We were raised in the European manner, not the Azerbaijani.” She paused as one of her sisters insisted that I have cookies with my tea.

Hers was an unusually privileged childhood. Most of the oil workers lived in hovels. Joseph Stalin got his start in revolutionary work trying to organize them for the Communist Party. She remembers when the Reds took over Baku. “They came to us at night. They had revolvers, and they frightened my mother into an asthma attack.”

For a time they were lucky. The Bolsheviks confiscated her father’s houses and his oil wells but permitted the family to go to Turkey.

“In 1926 my father heard that the situation in Baku had improved because of the New Economic Policy. They weren’t persecuting capitalists anymore. My father loved Baku. He decided to come back.”

It was an ill-timed decision. Far away, in Moscow, the brief liberalization of the New Economic Policy was ending as Stalin consolidated his power.

“My father wasn’t very clever,” Sara said. “They arrested him for being a former capitalist. They put a stool pigeon in his cell. This provocateur started to curse Stalin. My father said, ‘What do you want? He’s a dictator.’ This comment was reported. He was sent to Kazakhstan and shot.”

Under Khrushchev, Sara’s father was posthumously rehabilitated. She began to work as a historian, and she published a history of medieval Baku. By the time she celebrated her 90th birthday, Azerbaijan was independent again, and Sara Ashurbeili was regarded as a cultural treasure. By then the first Caspian oil boom was only a memory, replaced by a post-Soviet reality of rusty derricks and poisoned soil and water.

During the latter years of the Soviet Union, Caspian oil production stagnated and declined. The legacy of Soviet production methods is evident on the ground near Tengiz, the oil field on the northeast shore of the Caspian in Kazakhstan, now being redeveloped by Tengizchevroil, a joint venture that involves Chevron, Mobil, and the government of Kazakhstan. The Soviets sloppily exploited the Tengiz area for years, leaving behind pools of oil scum on the desert floor. In 1985 a well caught fire and burned for a year.

Satellites recorded a plume of smoke that stretched hundreds of miles northward. Glazed shards of crystallized sand, turned a topaz blue by the intense heat, still litter the site. At one old Soviet derrick I visited not far from the sea, leaks of water and salts had created shallow pink ponds on the brown land, which glistened and fluttered in the breeze.

Tengiz looks more efficient under the joint venture’s management than it evidently was in Soviet times. The ground around the wells is clean and neat. Gas flares from four tall stacks, contributing to a slight haze over the project. Tidy, stadium-size piles of yellow sulfur, separated from the crude oil and gas in an on-site plant, wait for buyers. The Western expatriates and their Kazakh partners work in prefabricated metal buildings with the look of a military base. Outside the earthen dikes that protect the complex from the sea, flamingos sometimes wade in the shallow water.

The largest oil deposit at Tengiz begins more than 12,000 feet [3,660 meters] below ground. Several years after they began investigating, Chevron geologists had yet to find its bottom, but they tentatively ranked it as one of the world’s ten largest deposits, with more than 25 billion barrels of oil. The idea that it may be only one of many enormous, partly neglected deposits awaiting exploitation was one of the factors behind the boom psychology of the mid-90s.

Another was that just as the demise of the Soviet Union made the Caspian potentially accessible to the West, Iraqi oil was embargoed during the gulf crisis in 1990. Simultaneously the U.S. sought to restrain the development of Iranian oil exports to punish that nation for its involvement with terrorism. All the while, global demand for oil was pushing close to global capacity. The Caspian looked like a logical place to replace production lost in Iraq and Iran.

That idea suited the new governments in the region. They were looking for allies to buttress their fragile independence against the two powers that have traditionally controlled the Caspian—Russia and Iran. They saw Western oil companies as a source of investment and technology. And they reckoned that once the companies were involved, their governments’ interests would be engaged. Thus they eagerly sought Western investment.

This meshing of interests quickly led the United States to become a leading booster of Caspian oil development. President Clinton entertained the leaders of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan at the White House. The Department of Energy published estimates of the Caspian’s potential oil reserves—179 to 195 billion barrels—which, if proved, could make the region one of the world’s major sources of oil. (Saudi Arabia, in comparison, has proven reserves of 261 billion barrels.) The numbers were high enough to induce the U.S. to exhort the oil industry to build the new pipelines that would be required to transport the anticipated Caspian oil to Western markets without letting much of it pass under Russian or Iranian control.

So far, however, reality remains stubbornly short of the anticipated bonanza. The 1997 output in the Caspian was more comparable to Argentina’s than to the oil giants of the Persian Gulf. The AIOC’s first offshore project, called Chirag 1, was pumping only 90,000 barrels a day at the beginning of this year, about a tenth of the overall production goal the consortium hopes to reach early in the next century.

Doubts are growing about how much oil will be discovered and how profitable it will be. A geologist in one of the Western consortiums told me his company had recently drilled two dry holes in North Apseron, an offshore Azerbaijani field. And in the wells that have proved to contain oil, drillers have found problems with maintaining pressure, in part due to mud volcanoes on the floor of the sea. Tapping these deposits will require frequent and expensive injections of water, the geologist said. He called the oil-boom talk “a scam.”

Even if great pools of oil are recovered, there are doubts about whether, and how profitably, it can be shipped to Western markets. The east-west pipelines that the Clinton administration has touted as the solution to this problem would cost billions of dollars and would, of necessity, skirt areas of political turmoil and ethnic violence. It remains to be seen whether Western investors will back them, particularly if the market price of oil remains low. Late last year, for just those reasons, the oil companies that would have to invest in the Baku-to-Ceyhan pipeline into Turkey told the State Department they intended to hold off until market conditions change in their favor. Negotiations continue.

“There’s been a lot of media hype” about a Caspian oil bonanza, said Robert Ebel, an energy and national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “Potential is one thing, but you still have to drill wells that produce oil.” Ebel predicts that in the year 2010 the Caspian region will export about 2.5 million barrels of oil a day—roughly the amount Britain now draws from the North Sea. “It would not be pivotal” in the world market, he said, “but it could be significant at the margin.“

Even if that prediction is right and the Caspian increases its production by a factor of three or four, the Caspian governments would then face the challenge of using the oil money as the foundation for prosperous, modern societies. A tour of the nations with Caspian shorelines raises several doubts about their ability to do so.

Corruption is a pandemic problem, so open that even the most casual visitor can see it. I took the overnight ferry once from Turkmenbashy, on the eastern shore, to Baku. The boat was full of Azerbaijanis, Turkmens, and other nationalities, most of them trying to make a little money by taking something available on one side of the sea and selling it on the other.

The boat docked at mid-morning. The passengers lined up. And then they stood in the heat for hours, waiting for the customs officers of the port of Baku to admit them, one by one, to a little shack for a shakedown. “If you don’t give them [the equivalent of U.S.] $15 or $20,” a Georgian standing behind me in line said bitterly, “they find something wrong with your documents.” In front of us a stocky Turkmen woman carrying vegetables in a sack, wearing a woven head scarf, decided she had had enough. She started to complain, loudly. A young soldier walked up to her and cuffed her head with the back of his hand. She quieted down. And the line moved slowly, sullenly forward.

Corruption in the Caspian is like a hidden tax. I spoke to one man in the Baku suburb of Suraxani who told me that his child had just started the first grade. She came home after day and announced that the school had reading textbooks for only a handful of the students in each class. It turned out that the rest of the primers for his child’s school had disappeared into the marketplace. There they could be bought for the equivalent of five [U.S.] dollars, not an insignificant sum in an economy where a laborer might make the equivalent of $40 a month. My acquaintance wanted his daughter to get off to a good start in school, so he scraped together five dollars and bought her a textbook. He opened it. The first page was devoted to a photo of a smiling President Heydar Aliyev with the caption “A gift to the first grader from the government of Azerbaijan.”

And so it goes, on up the line. A representative of a Western oil company mentioned to me that his company was having trouble getting cooperation from an official of the Azerbaijani state oil company, cooperation the Azerbaijanis were obligated to provide. When the company inquired about the delay, it was told that the matter might be speeded up if someone would find a way to enroll the official’s son at Harvard—on a scholarship.

The official American view, a State Department diplomat told me, is that corruption in the Caspian, while a serious problem, is not so egregious that it will prevent American corporations from doing business there legally. And the evidence, according to oil company sources, is that for the multibillion-dollar consortium agreements on which the American presence in the Caspian is predicated, the powers that be make certain that no bribes are required. They want American involvement in the region as a counterbalance to Russia, Iran, and other nearby powers. But below that level, anyone’s wallet is fair game. And thus it’s fair to ask whether, if the Caspian oil boom proves to be more than hype, a substantial portion of the money that rolls in will not roll right out again in the form of Mercedes-Benz sales and numbered bank accounts, leaving the people as impoverished as ever.

Even if corruption does not siphon the oil windfall away, there is reason to doubt that the Caspian nations can take full advantage of the sums scheduled to be invested. If they are to do so, each oil dollar from the West will need to reverberate several times through the local economies, helping to finance a network of businesses. Thus far, that hasn’t happened.

The joint venture at Tengiz, when I visited it, operated like an expedition into space, relying on the surrounding area for almost nothing. Equipment and materials were imported. Even food for the thousands of employees was trucked in by suppliers based in Western Europe. Over the past few years the joint venture has begun to buy some food and materials from local suppliers, but much of its money is still spent abroad.

“It’s disappointing,” said Charlie Auvermann, a Tengizchevroil spokesman. In other countries where Chevron operates, such as China, he said, local suppliers line up to sell Chevron everything from trucks to tomatoes. Many of the dollars Chevron invests thus strengthen local businesses. But the Kazakh economy has been very slow to respond to the opportunity Tengizchevroil represents. The region has no entrepreneurial history and almost no business community. Many of its leaders evidently still think in the old ways.

As part of its agreement with Kazakhstan, which is expected to give the state treasury roughly 80 percent of oil profits, Tengizchevroil donated 50 million dollars to a fund for the betterment of the people of the Atyrau region. At the insistence of the local government the bulk of that sum was spent on the sort of services and ventures that the state traditionally provided in communist days: a boiler plant, a bakery, a hospital, housing for flood victims.

The village closest to Tengiz is called Qaraton, and there the oil boom was only a promise, and the old system seemed very entrenched. Qaraton’s roads were potholed and dusty, and its masonry was crumbling. Tengizchevroil sent occasional help to the village when asked—a truck or a tractor. More recently the joint venture donated two million dollars to finance new housing. Qaraton showed few if any signs of budding enterprise.

The mayor, Rakhirzhan Murgabayev, a thin, vigorous 38-year-old, confirmed the village’s poverty. “In 1991 the wind blew from the sea, and the water came up and flooded us. In 1992 the government built a dike that has kept the sea away.” There was still no shortage of things in Qaraton that needed fixing, he agreed, from streets to schools. “But our economy is broke.”

I asked why no one in the village had found a way to sell anything to the joint venture.

“I don’t know why,” he said after a pause. “We were interested in it, but there has to be initiative. We could sell them flour and grain, but we don’t have equipment.” He meant the trucks, the harvesters, the storage facilities of a modern agricultural system. “Maybe if the joint venture supplied
the equipment. . . .”

I heard this sort of fatalistic answer many times around the Caspian. In Baku one evening I bought a couple of Turkish beers from a seaside kiosk, sat on a bench and shared them with a young welder named Aidin Gusseinov. He had just completed a 14-day stint on the AIOC’s Chirag 1 offshore platform. I asked him whether he had ever thought of starting a welding business with the training he’d had, trying to get a piece of the construction money being spent in Baku. He shook his head. “That depends on people higher than me.”

“Why not you?” I asked.

“They wouldn’t let me. They’d beat me down, say, ‘You’re nothing.’”

“Who are ‘they’?” I wanted to know.

They, Aidin explained, are the people with money and power in Azerbaijani society, the people driving BMWs. They are often the children of those who had power in the communist era. Only they allow themselves to think boldly. Everyone else, Aidin said, is a slave whose lot in life is to work like a slave.

It was the saddest conversation I had in my travels about the Caspian. I had thought that someone of Aidin’s age might think differently from those raised and educated under the Soviet system. The truly debilitating Soviet legacy, its effect on attitudes, will be much more difficult to shed than, say, the Cyrillic alphabet.

But the future of the Caspian depends on shedding it and taking advantage of whatever oil moves from the Caspian to the world market. That is in part because the Caspian nations have been destroying the other resource that traditionally sustained them—fish.

Not so long ago the Caspian Sea teemed with fish. A writer of the early Soviet period, Konstantin Paustovsky, published this description of the docks at the Russian port at Astrakhan in a book called The Black Gulf: “Night and day sunburnt people on the fishing rafts, all covered in scales as with a coat of mail, hauled the mottled carcasses of the sturgeons from their fishing smacks with a boathook and flung them down with a heavy thud on the planks. Endless files of blue-trousered girls bore carp to the refrigerator, holding the golden, stupid fish by their wet coral gills.”

There are places where Paustovsky’s Caspian still exists. Below Astrakhan the Volga River, the sea’s largest single source, splits into a thousand smaller streams as it flows through a vast, marshy, sparsely inhabited delta. White-tailed eagles, ducks, herons, and hundreds of other species depend on these wetlands. The marsh serves as a filter, cleansing the river of some of the pollution dumped into it by upstream factories. By the time the last reeds of the delta give way to the open Caspian, the water is shallow, clear, fresh to the taste. Large flocks of whistling swans float on its wind-ruffled surface.

The Caspian still has miles of undeveloped coastline, particularly along its eastern shore in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Along the Turkmen coast there are more camels to be seen than humans. The water close to the shore is turquoise blue. Small pink flowers find purchase in the scrubby lee of the seaside dunes.

But by the time the waters reach the Caspian’s lower end, under the brow of the Elburz Mountains in Iran, the sea is a deep, dark gray and fouled with the discharge from sewer pipes and factory drains. Poachers too have done their work. And the fishing reflects all of this.

The costs of pollution are borne by people like Ismail Abaszadeh, a master in the preparation of caviar. On a warm September morning not long ago Ismail rose with the sun in the Iranian port of Bandar-e Kiashahr, some 600 miles [965 kilometers] south of Astrakhan. In a room furnished largely with carpets, he quickly recited the dawn prayers of the Muslim. His wife, Narges, rose quietly with him and prepared a breakfast of tea, bread, and goat cheese. He said good-bye to Narges and walked his bicycle through a dusty, rocky alley, past a photo shop and a doctor’s office, and then onto pavement where he started to ride, passing police headquarters, an appliance store, and the shops of some rice merchants.

The road was dotted with people on their way to work—men sitting astride sputtering motorcycles and women wrapped in the black chador, perched like ravens on the side of the road, waiting for buses. He pedaled until the pavement turned to sand near the Sefid River. There was no bridge, no car ferry. Ismail crossed in a 15-foot [4.6-meter] open boat, the kind the Caspian fishermen use. Then he pedaled a couple of miles farther to the fishing base where he works. Then he waited.

It was mid-morning before the fishermen, working nets set about half a mile [0.8 kilometer] from shore, pulled up a sturgeon, a variety the Iranians call chalbash and the Russians call osyetr. At the dock two fishermen leaped from their boat and placed the quivering fish in a wooden litter. Inside the processing building, Ismail and his assistants put on white boots, smocks, caps, masks. They washed their hands and pulled on rubber gloves, as if getting ready for surgery.

The fish was brought in and laid out on the granite floor. The chalbash looks like a cross between a catfish and a stegosaurus; it has whiskers and rows of sharp, bony protrusions along its back where other fish would have fins. They washed, weighed, and measured it: a shade less than five feet [1.5 meters] long, a bit more than 37 pounds [17 kilograms]. Carefully, an assistant sliced open the fish’s belly and revealed the roe: thousands of gleaming black eggs, each about the size of the point on a dull pencil. This man scooped out the roe and removed it to a sink, placing it on top of a nylon sieve. The assistant gently massaged the mass of roe and supporting tissue; the eggs fell through onto a finer screen.

Finally it was time for Ismail to work. He washed the strained roe in fresh, icy water and picked away a few bits of flesh. He placed it in a stainless steel bowl and carried it through a doorway into a smaller, colder room. He weighed it. This chalbash yielded seven pounds [3.2 kilograms] of roe. Ismail consulted a chart hanging on the wall. He told an assistant to measure out 185 grams (six and a half ounces) of salt.

“I worked my way up to this job through several stages,” he would explain later. “I went to a school where they taught me things like sanitation rules and quality control. I became an assistant master, and I worked with a master for two years. He retired, and for five years I have been a master.

“I don’t have any discretion about how much salt to add,” he said. “I go by the chart, which shows how many grams of salt to use per kilo of roe, depending on the time of the year.”

But then came the stage in the process that cannot depend solely on charts. Ismail took the salt and gently kneaded it into the roe. He never tasted the product. He felt it.

“A master has to sense exactly how long to knead the salt and the roe,” he said. “If you don’t do it long enough, the caviar will be immature. If you do it too long, the eggs turn into pulp. It comes from experience.”

Within a couple of minutes, his fingers told him that this roe had become caviar. Tenderly, an assistant transferred it into tins and secured the lids with granite disks. The caviar would remain in a refrigerator for a day or so until a special truck came to pick it up and start it on its way to Europe and Asia. There it would sell for about $630 a pound [0.5 kilogram]; finer varieties of caviar, from the sturgeon species called beluga, go for well over a thousand dollars a pound [.5 kilogram]. For his work in creating this wealth Ismail Abaszadeh says he receives about six dollars a day.

“I can live well on what I make,” he told me. What bothers him is the idle time he must put in waiting for the sturgeon. “Twelve years ago we had more fish than this. And when I have nothing to do, it makes me unhappy.”

He is not the only unhappy one. At the other end of the Caspian I watched the men of a Russian village called Tsvetnoye spread a big net they call a nyevod in midstream. They laboriously worked it back toward the muddy shore and waded into the shallows to claim their catch. There were only two sturgeon, both males. A morning’s work by a dozen men produced no caviar.

During Soviet times fishing limits were strictly enforced. Now they are not, and sturgeon stocks have plummeted. In Astrakhan Vladimir Ivanov of the Caspian Fishery Research Institute told me that in the early 1980s the Soviet Union recorded sturgeon catches of 20,000 to 26,000 tons a year. These days the official catch for all the Caspian nations is about 3,000 tons.

Ivanov said poachers are largely to blame. “If we can’t get an agreement with the other Caspian states that stops poaching, we may have to ban fishing completely for several years.”

It’s not hard to find poachers. One Sunday in May I left my room in Atyrau, Kazakhstan, and walked along the bank of the Ural River. I passed dozens of Kazakhs who seemed to be whiling away the time talking and playing cards on the riverbank. A closer look revealed small sticks stuck in the mud, and an even closer look revealed translucent filament attached to the sticks.

When one of the sticks, which the poachers call “watchmen,” bent, the card players sprang into action. Their leader was a hefty woman named Anna, wearing a pink housedress and orange socks. She pulled up the filament, a line perhaps 50 yards [46 meters] long hung with dozens of fish-size loops. A male sevryuga had swum into one of the loops. Anna hauled in the line until the fish was flopping at the edge of the water. A boy clubbed it on the head and dragged the carcass into some bushes. Anna took the brick to which the far end of the line was tied and handed it to a second boy in a leaky skiff. He rowed it out to the middle of the Ural and dropped it in. Anna resumed playing cards.

She would, she said, get less than a dollar a pound [0.5 kilogram] for the fish’s meat when she sold it in the Atyrau market. She’d keep some of it to feed her family. If an inspector caught her, she would give up the fish and a few dollars as a bribe. Even if the sevryuga had been bearing roe, Anna would not have earned much. Poachers don’t get the money that middlemen further up the line receive. In the streets of Turkmenbashy a few days after I met Anna, someone offered me a couple of pounds of caviar in a mason jar for $40. People like Anna sell their futures so cheaply because they are living on the verge of desperation.

“I wouldn’t do this if there was work, if I didn’t have five kids to feed,” said Alik, another of the Atyrau poachers. He’d worked as a truck driver in Soviet days, but he’d been laid off. He was wearing his socks upside down, the holes in the heels resting on his insteps. “I catch a sturgeon; half of it feeds my family for three days, and I sell the other half,” he said.

It is hard to argue with Alik, except that his efforts are multiplied by those of thousands like him. Even more damage is done by poachers with boats and nets who fish the Caspian itself. The result is a threat—if not to the species, then to the fishing and caviar industry.

But Alik is a middle-aged man. For him and many of his generation along the Caspian shores, the prospect of a shining future that justifies short-term sacrifice is even more remote now than in Soviet times. Life has been no happier for them than it was for Sara Ashurbeili. No place demonstrates this better than Sumqayit, a city on the Azerbaijani coast north of Baku, which I toured with a man named Salman Jamarlov, an engineer on the staff of the city’s committee on ecology.

Sumqayit was once a city of promises. Moscow planners decreed its expansion from a village to a model center for petrochemical industries, with parks and promenades and a seaside boulevard fringed with topiary hedges. But Moscow drove Sumqayit to meet rising quotas for plastics and fertilizers. Hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic wastes each year were released into the atmosphere or dumped into a creek that fed them to the Caspian. Jamarlov remembered that as a young man, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, he never wondered what happened to those wastes. Gradually, as he rose into management, he started to realize what was being done and to fear “that the sea will punish us for what we are doing to it.”

The environmental crisis worsened. Stillbirths and miscarriages rose dramatically. Pollution overwhelmed the sea around Sumqayit and Baku, creating a virtual dead zone.

Sumqayit cracked apart as the Soviet Union did. In 1988 long-repressed hostility between Azerbaijanis and Armenians erupted. In a pogrom the Armenians were driven from the city. With the breakdown of trade between Soviet republics, Sumqayit’s factories started to shut down.

Now the city groans under this legacy. Refugee Azerbaijanis driven from Armenia in reciprocal pogroms have crowded into Sumqayit as they did in Baku, finding no work and creating instant slums. Factories sit idle on the edge of the sea. Untreated sewage spills from big pipes into the Caspian. Children, inured to the smell and the danger, play nearby. Jamarlov observed in embarrassed silence as I watched these kids.

“I won’t be able to see the changes we need,” he said. “I hope my children will.”

Salman Jamarlov was then 58. His children, I reckoned, were of the same generation as Jamshid Khalilov, the student at the state oil academy. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps Jamshid’s generation will see change for the better.

Jamshid told me he did not pass the Azerbaijan International Operating Company’s employment test. He missed the cutoff score in the written exam required to move on to the next stage in the selection process—missed it, he was told, by a single point. He intends to apply again after he receives his degree in the spring of this year. Jamshid still dreams of entering that other world he glimpsed. Like all the people of the Caspian, he can only hope that he has not already run out of chances.

Alik, a poacher profiled in the above story, is a criminal in the eyes of his government. His crime endangers sturgeon but helps keep his family alive. What would you tell him? Share your thoughts in our Caspian Sea forum.

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