The Shocking Story of the Nobel Family and Russian Oil

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Let's take a step back and talk a bit about how he got there because the this the family Nobel is very interesting.

[00:00:07]It's like they had a bunch of overachievers. I talked about Emanuel who's the his Emanuel's grandpa.

[00:00:15]>> He had these three sons who you write about.

[00:00:18]>> There was Robert. There was Ludwig who's Emanuel's dad.

[00:00:22]>> And there was Alfred who we know about from the Dynamite and the Nobel Prizes.

[00:00:26]But Robert plays a critical role in the birth of the oil fortune too. Yeah, >> he was sort of the kermoginly nar do well. I mean like he was smart but he was >> his own worst enemy. I don't know. I think he might have had asberers like he didn't do well socially.

[00:00:38]>> He did not he sort of he rubbed everybody the wrong way but he was this adventurous free-spirited guy. And so I I'm Emanuel the grandfather came over.

[00:00:47]He was sort of this inventive genius tinkerer. He designed undersea mines and he was a chemist and dealt with explosives. So it kind of got the family started down that track. But he had been bankrupt like he he didn't start off with a lot of >> he escaped bankruptcy in Sweden and went alone to the Russian Empire in the 1840s and left his family behind and then once he got a contract selling undersea mines to the Zsar sent for the rest of the family and they all come over to Russia near St. Petersburg as immigrants from Sweden and then he goes bankrupt again after the Crimean War. You know they they actually are using the mines in the Crimean War. They mine the Baltic Sea to to fight. But then the Russ Russians lose the war and all the contracts that Nobel had with Azar are not honored and so he goes bankrupt again and he returns to Sweden. But his son Ludwig and Robert stay and they rebuild a munitions uh factory and an engine factory and they get another contract. So now Europe of course is rearming again by the 1860s.

[00:01:43]You know, it's like it's off and on again. And they get a contract for 100,000 rifles. And so Ludwig, who's the boss, sends his brother Robert down to the caucuses by the Caspian Sea where these huge walnut trees because they need wood for the shoulder stocks of the rifles. So Robert goes down there with 20,000 silver rubles to buy a bunch of wood. And he gets down there and he gets into this area along the Caspian Sea that is also it's like the the land of the eternal flame where natural gas is seeping through fissures and rocks and ignites and has an eternal flame there.

[00:02:16]There's so much oil in the ground that it's puddling up on the surface of the ground and people just skim it. There's no drilling. There's no technology. They just skim the oil off the surface.

[00:02:24]They're so >> Did they know it was liquid gold at that time?

[00:02:26]>> They used it for like a um a lubricant or a solve or something like that, but they weren't really uh you know drilling or refining it in any big way.

[00:02:37]>> And uh Robert gets down there's like, "Oh my god, like forget the trees. I'm buying land for oil." Which he does. He takes the 20,000 without telling his brother. doesn't buy the wood, buys land and a refinery. And the Nobels who've been building engines and you know they have tons of technology and resources.

[00:02:52]They come down. This is 1873. So three years after Standard Oil was founded in America. They take the American playbook and they put it into play in Baku.

[00:03:01]>> But I love I mean just sorry to interrupt, but I love it in the book because it's called the Lost Empire of Emanuel Noel. You write about how Robert's down there and again he's he's sort of the nerd dowwell brother of the three and he's been given this mission.

[00:03:15]He's been entrusted by Lewig who does know what he's doing >> and instead of doing the one thing he was told to do which is you get the get the wood the walnut for the shoulder stocks. He blows the whole fortune on oil which is not the family business yet. No, it hasn't been approved. They can't text. They can't call. The a letter would take six to eight weeks.

[00:03:35]there's just no way to get an approval.

[00:03:37]So, he's like, "I'm doing I'm making executive decision." And at first, they're like, "You did what?"

[00:03:44]>> Yeah. He gets back up north and and Ludvig's like, "You did what?" He's like, "My god, my crazy brother. Can you do anything right?" And then he starts looking at a little bit. He's like, "Wait a minute. This may be like a a crazy stroke of luck through my wild brother." I don't know if you have the photo of that mule cart where they >> we'll put it in >> are, you know, delivering the oil in that way, but literally there was no drilling. It was just people digging with shovels and skimming and putting the oil in wooden crates and dragging it around by mules.

[00:04:09]>> It looks like something out of a Little House on the Prairie.

[00:04:11]>> So, it still looks like ancient times when the Nobels get there.

[00:04:13]>> Yeah.

[00:04:14]>> And then >> that's how people were collecting oil at the time.

[00:04:16]>> Yeah. They'd put it in a barrel and put it on a back of a mule cart like that and and wheel it around and then you get your deliver and you know the wooden barrels are leaky or they just break all together. So the Nebels come down with money and technology and expertise and suddenly they're on the map as one of the major oil companies in the world because there's just such abundant reserves of oil in the ground >> and not that many people are doing it.

[00:04:36]So they figure out how to refine it.

[00:04:38]>> The laws of the zar were really backward then. Like you couldn't actually own the land. It was a four-year lease system.

[00:04:42]So no one's going to build a bunch of infrastructure on land that they may or may not be able to renew the lease in four years. And in 1873 >> Oh, the irony.

[00:04:50]In 1873, just as the Nobels arrive, they change that law and they're really trying to encourage business uh and you know, infrastructure building. So, they buy the land and they own it and then they really invest and and build a great enterprise.

[00:05:02]>> So, it takes off and Emanuel really is the one who winds up I mean Alfred and the other Nobels are doing it, but Emanuel winds up being the one to really expand it and make it a huge thing and um take it next level. and part of his story. It's it's not unlike Rudolph Diesel, who's the star of your last book, which is a huge New York Times bestseller. Thanks to all of you guys listening uh in part, it did so so well.

[00:05:26]And um that was about the mysterious case of Rudolph Diesel, who is the guy behind the diesel engine. Most people don't even know that it's a proper name.

[00:05:33]Diesel gas is spelled with a lower D still at the gas station. But it that that came from Rudolph Diesel, a man and um who invented the the engine.

[00:05:43]And the the reason I say they're similar, Rudy Rudy D, >> Rudy D >> and Emanuel is they were both good men.

[00:05:50]Like they actually cared about the product they were in investing in or inventing in Rudy's case and the workers who would come work for them. This was something in in a country in which, you know, Lenon and Stalin would push the workers like, "We need a revolt. Burn it all down.

[00:06:10]>> F the man, you know, all power to the Soviet, whatever."

[00:06:14]>> It was hard to sell that to the workers who were in the employee of Emanuel Nobel, who loved him.

[00:06:21]>> Yeah. Yeah. God, there's there's so much amazing stuff packed in this book. I wish I could like go into all of it, but that's exactly right. The people who worked for Nobel, Baku in general was a terrible, dangerous place to work.

[00:06:32]People who would get lowered into the oil mines, half the time you're not coming back out. It was, it was very dangerous. When they hit a gusher, it was like an explosion. People working the rig would go deaf. The concussion was so big, you could go permanently deaf.

[00:06:45]>> It would blast sand and rock hundreds of feet into the air. The oil would would uh shoot up for weeks, sometimes before they could contain it. if it if there was even a spark, the whole thing just turned into a firebomb and killed many people. So, it was a very dangerous place to work. Beyond that, the living conditions in Baku were terrible. You know, there's dirt floors and crime and and violent crime. But Nobel was different. He built factory or he built employee housing, schools, hospitals. He built uh you know things for leisure, pastime play, you know, like the it wasn't called bowling, but it was sort of like bowling. He had a bunch of those kinds of things for people, libraries, and so the employees proudly called themselves Nobel Lights. It was the place you wanted to work. It was it was had a reputation as a benevolent uh place to be. And so when you mentioned the 1905 revolution, when there was insurgency or or you know when there was worker agitation often done by Stalin personally in Baku, he was constantly agitating the workers in southern Russia. Nobel got off easy because the workers would say, "Actually, he's not he's not the capitalist pig. He's not the one we want to go after. He's actually a good guy.

[00:07:54]>> I like my boss."

[00:07:55]>> Yeah. And the people who got it worse with the Rothschilds are Jewish. They got it the worst. Um >> because of anti-semitism.

[00:08:02]>> Anti-semitism was terrible throughout Europe. In Russia, it was particularly bad. I mean, laws on the books making it hard for Jewish businesses at that time.

[00:08:10]So, it was it was a it was a bad time to be running a business as a as a Jewish person. the Rothschilds were so influential they could sometimes overcome that a little bit but it was pretty uphill for them even >> um but then you know when the when the real uh things hit the fan there in 1917 and the revolution when they were literally dragging capitalist business owners out throwing them in some kangaroo court and then hanging them or imprisoning them Nobel's workers were protecting him you know they they were like this is not the guy to go after you know we feel loyalty to him and they really helped him in that period When the dollar's convertability into gold ended in 1971, gold was fixed at 35 bucks an ounce.

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[00:09:41]But you do have to act now as this special event only runs through April 30th. Text my initials MK to the number 989898 to join Birch Gold's learn and earn precious metals event by April 30th. That's MK to 989898 today. So this I mean he really he was both noble and Nobel to quote Karine Jeanierre. Um he was he was a good man and he actually was trying to do things the right way and he did everything right. He he worked with the Russian government. This is Tsarist, the the Tsarist government before Stalin and Len and all that. Um, and got a government title eventually.

[00:10:18]He was Swedish, but he eventually became a Russian citizen. He was trying to like, you know, lean in to his new community and take care of the people and really did not see this particular threat coming his way, which who could.

[00:10:31]But the other half of the book, we learn all all about Emanuel and the Nobels is we learn all about little little Joey Stalin.

[00:10:39]>> Yeah.

[00:10:40]>> And what a terrible man he was in so many ways and for so much of his life.

[00:10:45]Now, I will say there was one thing, a couple of things that jumped out like you did a good job of humanizing him.

[00:10:51]Yeah. in some in the ways that were available. And I thought it was very interesting that >> even the greatest villains of the 20th century were little boys at one time, you know, and you learn about his really brutal childhood >> and he his genuine love for his first wife. Like he was >> crazy about his first wife, like genuinely in love and also a poet. What was it? He was into the arts in some way. I'm trying to remember.

[00:11:13]>> I mean, he was a big reader. He was a singer. Um so he a lot came out about Stalin after the fall of the Soviet Union in ' 91. Some archives become became more available. So we learn a little more about the the young Stalin years. In fact there's a book called Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montafiori which is very good. And he grew up in these hard scrabble streets of the country of Georgia. He was basically in a street gang. He was getting his butt kicked almost daily coming home from school. He injured his arms. He had one arm that was kind of a little withered and and smaller than the other arm. Not good if you're getting into street fights uh every day. And then he was of all things Stalin was studying to be a priest. Yeah.

[00:11:55]>> For many years he was he was studying to be a priest. And he was a big reader and he was singing in like the choir.

[00:12:02]Uh but in those years he also did get access to Marxist thinking and writings.

[00:12:08]And as he was leaving, he abandoned the priesthood as a path. And just as he did that, he started writing for a Marxist paper. And he stayed in southern Georgia and he he essentially became like a gangster. He would run protection racket schemes and he would rob, you know, payroll wagons going to banks and things like that so that he could take that money and send it up to to Lenin and fund the Bolevik party. And he became Lenin's sort of like gangster, his main henchman in southern Russia. So he was the guy in the Baku area.

[00:12:39]>> Can you give us a little bit on Lenin just for people who don't we all know that name but like how did he emerge and become the the future leader? He was the first leader before Stalin of well it would become the Soviets but you know the >> Stalin came from like hard scrabble background. His mother was a sometimes prostitute to pay the bills. His dad was an abusive this is all Stalin. His dad was an abusive alcoholic. Lenin came from a much better his his parents were more academic and like not exactly nobles but close noble adjacent I guess but his older brother was a re you know just as Alexander I was you know introducing these reforms. His brother was one of those people who was an insurgent who was organizing and and taking advantage of free assembly and free press to write revolutionary, you know, doctrine and sort of follow uh, you know, this sort of like urban overthrow thesar movement. And he did attempt to assassinate uh, >> the brother or >> Lennon's older brother Lennon's older brother. And he was caught in in an assassination attempt >> and he was hung they hanged. Hanged >> hanged. Thank you. Yeah, one of my pet peeves.

[00:13:52]>> Uh and so as a young boy, uh Vladimir Lennon watched his older brother get hanged.

[00:13:58]>> Gosh.

[00:13:58]>> Um and so that kind of sent him on a very radicalized >> radicalized path.

[00:14:03]>> And then he started reading Karl Marx.

[00:14:05]>> Yep. And he became a a disciple of Marxist doctrine and founded the the Bolevik party.

[00:14:11]>> So when when Lenin started getting political, was it like was his goal from the beginning to turn Russia communist?

[00:14:18]Was that the goal? Like I want to get rid of the monarchy. I want there to be a revolution and I want communism here and worldwide. That's my goal.

[00:14:26]>> Yeah. Yeah. The international play was was big. Like and that was one of the knocks on them after the October Revolution. There were some people are saying, you know, it's almost like today it's like is it Russia first or communism first?

[00:14:40]>> And a lot of people were saying look let's they're using Russia as just sort of a stepping stone for it was called the communist international common turn.

[00:14:48]um because they were trying to ferment revolution in Germany and Britain and America. Thanks for watching this clip.

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