When in 1949 a hero of socialist labour struck oil in the midst of the Caspian Sea a new chapter opened in the history of hydrocarbon exploitation in Azerbaijan that was to shape the petroleum imaginary of the Socialist Anthropocene. A utopian city on stilts was built for the Soviet pioneers of the offshore oil industry, equipped with dormitories, a technical school, libraries, shops, a hospital, cinema, gardens and a lemonade factory. Oil Rocks was a magnet for artists who in the 1950s made the strenuous journey to witness the heroism of oil workers in their battle with the elements to extract Caspian “black gold”.

This presentation considers the representations of Oil Rocks in socialist art as an exception to the general invisibility of the petroleum industry in modern literature and art. How can we account for the prominence of oil drilling imagery in Soviet Azerbaijani art and what does it tell us about the petroleum imaginary of the Socialist Anthropocene? What was the significance of the shift from the ethos of “commanding the Earth to serve Socialism” characteristic of socialist realist “oil” paintings to the more nuanced attitudes to nature detectable in severe style works of the late 1950s and early 1960s? How have artists addressed the social and environmental consequences of industrial modernity’s invisible dependence on hydrocarbons?