Category Archives: energy

by | 11 September 2025 · 6:15 pm

Venezuela’s Oil Industry Makeover

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 230-233:

Nationalizing and running government-owned enterprises had been perfected by socialist governments for one hundred years. From the examples in France and Germany, to the more recent profitable state ventures in China and Vietnam, there were many successful formulas to choose from. In Venezuela, participatory identity politics drove an entirely different agenda.

This story has been chronicled in the book Comandante, a first-person account by the Guardian’s Caracas correspondent Rory Carroll. Published in 2013, the book provides a unique view of events unfolding between 2004 and 2012, the years before Chávez died.

In one chapter Carroll describes a visit to Ciudad Guayana, the place where every Venezuelan government since the late 1960s had invested in the promise of a non-oil economy based on hydroelectric power, ore, bauxite, gold, and diamond mining. Ciudad Guayana would become tragically violent by the 2010s, and already bore the hallmarks of squalor and massive de-industrialization. At the city’s aluminum plants, in the hands of new worker-managers, everything had collapsed well before Chávez’s death.

“Political managers from Caracas with no background in industry. Ideological schools set up in factories. Investment abandoned, maintenance skimped, machinery cannibalized. A catalog of grievances detailing blunders, looting, and broken promises. Venalum, they said, had at a time stopped exporting to the United States to vainly seek ‘ideologically friendlier’ markets in Africa and South America. After months of stockpiling, aluminum managers returned to US buyers, but then the market had crashed, losing the company millions. To curry favors with Miraflores [the presidential palace in Caracas A.N.], another company imported trucks from Belarus, Chávez’s European ally, but the cabins were too high for the region’s twisting paths, terrifying drivers. The trucks were abandoned. Managers at another factory halted production and sold the company’s entire stock before disappearing with the cash. On and on went the denunciations, one anecdote bleaker than the last. Worst of all, said the union men, was that for the previous years bosses had refused to renew collective agreements, meaning workers lost their rights and half their wages to inflation.”

Carroll’s descriptions show the new priorities in the running of these enterprises. The formal world of management seems to have been trumped by the personal feelings and experiences of the new leaders. Most importantly, by the intuitive sense of their ethnic legacy. In this view a government company’s assets did not represent an opportunity for the country’s future profit. Rather, it was booty stolen from the blood and sweat of centuries. It was treasure. And the fair and right thing to do with treasure was to distribute it.

On a grand scale this was the fate of PDVSA, the state oil company. Because the value of treasure was perceived to be intrinsic to itself, and had no relationship to exploration, extraction, refining, and its sale in global markets, the new Chavista leadership’s priority was its distribution among the people. After 20,000 highly skilled managers and middle managers were fired in the PDVSA purges of 2003, more than 100,000 bona-fide Chavista party members were hired to work at the company. One of the best-run energy companies in the world had become a patronage machine tasked with running myriad welfare programs. The government would distribute the treasure while crude production capabilities degraded, refining capacity dwindled, and entire operational capabilities were destroyed. Actual production sank to about a million barrels a day in 2019, down from the 3.5 million that had been produced the year before Chávez assumed power. It was the lowest level in almost seventy-five years. The trendlines for production into the 2020s looked bleak.

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by | 4 September 2025 · 12:02 am

Venezuela’s “Dutch Disease”

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 118-119, 126-128:

The early theorists of Dutch disease studied how real economies, including those with robust consumer markets, reacted to a commodity boom. These writers did not consider what might happen to a small, barely functioning country, which did not even have a modern state in place when the first oil gusher blew out. The existing capital in Venezuela was negligible, which means that other, less measurable, factors came into play.

Arturo Uslar Pietri was the first person to pick up on the cultural strands of Dutch disease well before American academics started modeling the phenomenon. He was a descendant of landowners and had seen first-hand the death of the cocoa and coffee industry upon oil’s arrival. More importantly, he could see what oil was doing to the country as far back as the 1930s and 1940s. In a feat of uncanny prediction, he also foresaw the tragedy of the 2010s.

His brief analysis of the new economy was offered in a now-famous op-ed piece, “Sowing Oil,” published in 1936. For him, conditions were such that the newfound riches “could make Venezuela into an unproductive and lazy country, a giant oil parasite, swimming in a temporary and corrupting abundance, and driven toward an inevitable and imminent catastrophe.”

The main issue, he feared, was that either oil would run out, or that something synthetic would replace it, as had happened to other commodities familiar to South Americans, such as rubber or indigo. His thesis mirrors what the early theorists of Dutch disease would later acknowledge. What the academics ignored but Uslar could sense all around him were the broader, less tangible ways in which oil would permeate and dull Venezuelan society.

Uslar wrote his op-ed to counter the increasingly influential views of Rómulo Betancourt, who thought that oil was, and should be, everything. Alluding to Betancourt, he writes in “Sowing Oil” that having the state focus exclusively on the rent from oil was the “suicidal dream of naive men.” He believed the oil money should be used to develop a vigorous national industry, including modern agriculture.

…

While a lot has been written about how governments wasted oil revenues for decades, Dutch disease was very much a part of the private sector as well. Mid-sized and large companies that, in retrospect, had a real chance of global success, were never able to do anything about those prospects.

The shoe industry born in the Catia neighborhood of Caracas is a perfect example. The know-how of Sicilian and Neapolitan families that had emigrated from the old country to continue their shoe trade in Venezuela could never become globally competitive with a strong bolivar. Their companies were very prosperous for decades because the Ministries of Education and Defense would buy millions of shoes and boots. But the future was bleak without a consumer market big enough for the factories to reach substantial scale. The overvalued bolivar never let them export successfully, and cheap Chinese manufacturing eventually hit them hard. Later, they would be crushed by globally integrated and truly competitive retailers such as Zara.

The degree to which the out of context desarrollista policies failed the country is made evident by comparing two key Venezuelan companies and their Mexican counterparts. As early as 1979, well before NAFTA, Mexico’s Grupo Modelo managed to reinvent their weak and cheap working-class beer Corona into a “cool and light” alternative for American “Yuppie” consumers. The venture’s success turned Modelo into one of Latin America’s most valuable companies while Venezuela’s brewery Polar, awash in 1970s overvalued bolivars, did not take export markets seriously. Decade after decade Polar’s businesses expanded domestically, remaining tied to the price of oil and the swings of Venezuelan politics. Another Mexican company, Cemex, exploded out of humble beginnings to become the biggest cement company in the world. While its take-off did not happen until the 1980s, everything started with a financial consolidation, a series of acquisitions, and a listing in the local stock exchange in 1976. Right around that time, Cementos de Venezuela was happy to feed the building boom driven by the strong bolivar, a prelude to its eventual bankruptcy.

Rather than getting ready to expand through exports, the simplistic theory of import substitution allowed the Venezuelan private sector to use overvalued bolivar revenues to obtain dollar-denominated loans. Foreign banks at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s were ready to lend dollars against future bolivars. On top of every other challenge, the borrowing proved catastrophic.

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by | 2 September 2025 · 11:32 pm

Venezuela’s Oil Blessing and Curse

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 82-85:

It was dawn in the tiny fishing village of Cabimas when the earth started to shake on December 14, 1922. A roaring explosion followed the tremor, and a furious rainstorm of thick oil fell over the straw-roof shacks and dirt roads. The black rain went on for days.

The Barroso II oil field’s spectacular blowout spewed one million barrels of oil in a little over a week. It was then the world’s biggest known oil field, tapped just in time to feed a global economy fast converting from coal to fuel oil. The black rainstorm signaled a new era for one of South America’s poorest countries. Exploration and production would spread throughout the sparsely populated country as American roughnecks turned “béisbol” into a national pastime and pound cake into a local delight, “ponqué.” Everything from the most trivial to the most consequential would be transformed, starting with the economy.

Ever since Barroso II, three numbers have dominated many conversations seeking to explain the country’s destiny: barrels produced per day, their price in the global market, divided by the country’s population.

During the heyday of 1974, oil production reached 3.4 million barrels per day, the global price of crude oil stood at US$48 in 2019 dollars, and the country had thirteen million people. By 2019, the price of crude stood at US$50, production had bottomed out at 877,000 barrels per day, and the population had reached 28 million. By this somewhat arbitrary measure, the per capita production value in 1974 was US$4,582 for every Venezuelan. By 2019, it was US$572.

For many, this simple math tells their country’s story, a kabbala of its miseries and triumphs. The Chavista leadership of the late 2010s prayed the accelerating emigration would tilt the simple formula, or at least its trendline, in their favor. If enough people left the country, there would be fewer mouths to feed and able bodies to revolt, even on declining oil revenue. No one imagined, much less understood, the extent to which millions and millions of Venezuelans walking away from their country would answer the wildest wishes of those in power.

And yet, the long history of social and geographical conflict means that even a positive balance between oil production, international prices, and population cannot always guarantee peace.

The revolt leading to the coup d’état against General Pérez Jiménez in 1958, and Commander Chávez’s attempted coup in 1992, both took place when the global price of oil, and production capabilities, had not suffered significant downward pressures. Chavez’s coup came weeks after the end of 1991 when the economy had clocked the world’s fastest growth at 9.73%.

The dynamics behind the 1958 coup are illuminating. Three decades after Barroso II, the country was experiencing massive urban migration of the rural poor to the cities and unprecedented European and South American immigration. A new professional middle class and rising prosperity in many regional capitals had contributed much complexity to the country’s politics. General Pérez Jiménez never understood that the way he was brokering the oil wealth was out of step with a fast-changing Venezuela. The emerging actors demanded a new accommodation. By January 1958, a broad coalition overthrew the last general to rule the country in the 20th century.

Eleven months later, Acción Democrática’s Rómulo Betancourt set out to build a novel liberal state designed to broaden the oil treasure’s distribution. The new democracy would ensure the old rural poor, in the countryside or the big cities, received a much higher share of the bounty. The far from perfect but more independent unions, courtrooms, congressional chambers, political parties, and professional and trade associations allowed for a deeper and broader distribution of resources across constituencies throughout the country. Betancourt was determined to erase old ethnic and racial fractures but also paid attention to the growing expectations of more assertive regions, a nascent immigrant commercial class, and new industrial and financial interests. A more sophisticated accommodation to manage the oil bounty made sense for a country that had become too complex for the iron hand of a highland general and the machinations and prejudices of his conservative cronies.

While the construction of Betancourt’s gigantic new state would be very visible, a key component underpinning the country’s society since the 1930s would remain unmentioned: the currency’s value.

The bolivar’s high value relative to the dollar had been a political and cultural demand of economic elites and the nascent middle class as far back as the late 1920s. As oil revenues increased in the aftermath of President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1934 dollar devaluation, the bolivar emerged as one of the strongest currencies in the world. The country’s unique history and the realities of an oil economy developed on the back of a poor and virtually empty geography had turned the overvalued currency into a true religion. The generals and their conservative allies, and later Betancourt along with his socialist and liberal supporters, both built societies on the foundation of a strong bolivar. Their very different answers to the social, ethnic, and racial fractures that had torn the country apart for four hundred years had a shared, if silent, premise in the long-running currency consensus.

However, as often happens to societies whose good (and bad) fortunes depend on a single commodity, oil and its ability to prop up the currency became a fixed reference in the nation’s identity and a conveniently forgotten factor in its destiny. The connections tying modern universities, great theater, sophisticated newspapers, vibrant public debate, and transformational strides in nutrition, health, and education to the price of oil and the overvalued bolivar were always fuzzy.

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by | 1 September 2025 · 12:58 am

Early Rise of Hugo Chávez

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 53-55:

The slow collapse of the Adeco project started in the early 1980s, as oil prices fell and did not rise again, except for the Gulf War hiccup in 1990, until 2004. In 1998, when Chávez won his first election with 56% of the votes, the price of oil had just dropped in real dollars to its lowest levels since 1972. Venezuela’s population was then twelve million people, as opposed to the twenty-three million inhabitants of 1998.

If the country’s oil prospects had helped Betancourt dream of erasing, and then burying, any sense of racial and ethnic identity from the country at the beginning of the 20th century, 1998 presented a different landscape. The return of ethnic difference in the nation’s consciousness was already in the air.

As explained, Chávez broadened his base toward the end of the electoral campaign and eventually won the 1998 election with support from lighter-skinned middle-class voters. He campaigned hard for those votes by tapping into the desire for a powerful military figure at a time of uncertainty. He said the country and the state were broke only because someone, an “evil group,” had stolen all the wealth. By then his speeches lacked any mention of redistribution, and merely mentioned theft. If he stopped “them” from stealing, there would be plenty of money for all. But this was campaign rhetoric. It was clear to anyone who looked at the numbers that Chávez would not be able to do anything once in power.

Oil prices had hit rock bottom, and there was only so much revenue to go around. There were not even enough resources to satisfy Chávez’s core base in the favelas, much less reconstruct the state that had glued the country together for so many decades. Chávez’s short-term economic options were almost non-existent, but it is also clear he did not even have a plan.

What Chávez had was a prescient understanding of power: he realized the color-blind society built over the prior fifty years was broken and ready to die. Despite his one-nation pitch in the final months of the campaign, Chávez was aware that his powerbase could only be nourished by deepening, not bridging, the ethnic gap. He intuitively understood 19th-century Venezuelan politics, specifically the 100-plus years during which rulers had to grab and retain power in a country with vast swaths of extreme poverty, a weak state at best, and very little money.

The young Chávez vividly understood everything the young Uslar Pietri had described in his novel Las Lanzas Coloradas, which most of the country had forgotten. His encyclopedic knowledge of the songs, legends, heroes, and language of bygone times became a political currency of incalculable value. His humble origins in the rural Plains and his self-proclaimed Zambo identity (the original caste designating those of mixed African and Amerindian descent) made him a different kind of politician. The memory of his great-great-grandfather Maisanta, a renegade warlord whose guerrilla actions had killed former President Crespo in 1898, helped him understand the new politics that were to come.

He saw the power vacuum in front of him, as had been the case for ambitious would-be-rulers throughout the 1800s. Back in that century, a sudden drop in coffee prices, a shift in population, or a palace revolt in faraway Caracas, were always seen as golden opportunities for men of war to march with a few peons and take over the trophy capital while advocating the grievances of Pardo peasants.

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by | 30 August 2025 · 1:37 am

Betancourt’s Vision of Venezuela

From Venezuela’s Collapse: The Long Story of How Things Fell Apart, by Carlos Lizarralde (Codex Novellus, 2024), Kindle pp. 43-44:

Rómulo Betancourt was the architect of a Venezuela in which race and ethnicity were eradicated from the public discourse. An early 20th-century pro-democracy leader, he laid down the basis for the country’s race-neutral ideology as Venezuela’s president first in 1945, and then again in 1959. Adecos, as Betancourt’s followers were called, would go on to become the political reference point in the life of the country, until Chávez and the new demographic wave destroyed their social project. Their vision’s successes and failures are virtual keys to understanding contemporary Venezuela.

By 1940 the thirty-three-year-old Betancourt was already a promising political leader, but one in the very middle of a unique moment in history. Behind him lay a poor, provincial country with a vast countryside still recovering from the deep social fractures Laureano Vallenilla had described in 1919. Ahead of him was a nation with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to start over again. He imagined that properly distributed, oil money would create a brand-new country to be filled, like a vast empty canvas, with great ideas and institutions. The young Betancourt knew he could shape an entirely new political imaginary. He was convinced he could solve the underlying issues of the country’s ethnic fracture.

His political program for change was clear: the state would charge a 50% tax on all profits obtained by American and British oil companies to underwrite a welfare state that would wipe out poverty, and level all Venezuelans. An enormous investment in education would transform people into informed citizens, and an influx of migrants would bring their legacies to form a new society made up of equals.

His political party, Acción Democrática, would organize workers, peasants, students, professionals, and industrialists around the unifying idea of a new Venezuela that left behind castes, ethnicities, and places of birth. The party’s manifesto called the organization “multi-class” and was purposely silent on matters of race, ethnicity, castes, or regional origin. Oil would fuel the country’s development and well-being, and act as a social glue linking everything together.

…

Betancourt had to embody that majority to sell this project. He emphasized his mother’s African descent. His hometown was on the western edge of the Afro-Caribbean Barlovento coast. His accent lacked the upper-class singsong of Creoles, and he would occasionally refer to himself as a “mulatto from Guatire.” His Spanish was laced with provincial colloquialisms.

But most importantly, Betancourt’s public persona embraced the mannerisms, language, and humor of ethnic Pardos. Ethnicity is an ambiguous combination of perceptions, far from the clearer lines that can define race. By embracing and claiming to be a Pardo, Betancourt became the perfect spokesperson for a project that someone with a Creole accent, a more formal manner, or wearing starched shirts with cufflinks could never sell.

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by | 20 July 2023 · 5:57 am

The Spark that Toppled Ceauşescu

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 111-115:

László Tőkés had a history of conflict with Romania’s Reformed (Calvinist) Church authorities as well as with the political authorities; that’s how the pastor had ended up in Timişoara. At previous postings in Braşov and Dej, both in Transylvania (which has a large ethnic Hungarian minority), Tőkés had spoken out against the leadership of the Reformed Church, whose congregation in Romania was entirely ethnic Hungarian, and the condition of Romania’s Hungarians. This had provoked his relocation to Cluj—where his father had been dismissed as deputy bishop—and then, in 1986, to Timişoara (outside Transylvania), a predominantly Romanian Orthodox yet cosmopolitan city of about 350,000. What major trouble could the Hungarian pastor possibly cause there? In Timişoara, Tőkés set about reviving the small local Reformed church with his charisma. He allowed students to recite poetry at services, which was expressly forbidden, and spoke out against Ceauşescu’s unpopular “systematization” (destruction) of villages and their Orthodox churches. The Timişoaran authorities, faced with the prospect of organized dissent, pressured the Reformed Church bishop to remove Tőkés as pastor, which he did in March 1989. On that ground, the authorities set eviction proceedings in motion. Tőkés appealed. At Timişoara’s Reformed church building—three modest stories of grimy brick and stone, lacking even a cross or spire—every window of the pastor’s flat was smashed. In November, Tőkés was slashed in a knife assault by thugs during a break-in; police who were posted outside to keep him under house arrest did nothing. Finally, losing his official appeals, Tőkés appealed to parishioners at Sunday Mass to witness his scheduled “illegal” eviction on the coming Friday, December 15. That’s right: the authorities had informed the pastor of the precise date.

Around forty parishioners, mostly elderly, formed a human chain outside the pastor’s residence. They benefited from a sudden unseasonably warm winter stretch, following a brutal cold snap, but, more important, they defied the conspicuous Securitate. When the Securitate did not disperse the small crowd, more people beyond the pastor’s supporters joined, including ethnic Romanians, Germans, Serbs, Greeks, and, some have said, a few Gypsies. The Hungarian pastor spoke from his windows to the crowd outside in Romanian. Some who joined were from other Protestant denominations, such as the Baptists and Pentecostals, religious minorities that were similarly harassed. Others came from an adjacent stop for the tram that ferried workers to the city’s outlying industrial plants and students to the big local universities. The tram also facilitated the spread of information about the confrontation throughout the town. Timişoara’s inhabitants that winter, as previously, had no electricity for most of the day and often for much of the evening, including during the interval from 6:00 until 9:00 P.M., when people needed it most. Elevators were avoided, since the blackouts, coming without warning, trapped people in them. The strongest lightbulbs sold were only 40 watts. The temperature inside homes was no more than 55 degrees Fahrenheit in winter, and hot water usually came on just once a week.

People in Timişoara, as elsewhere in Romania, were given coupons to buy a few kilos of meat and fifty grams of butter—a month. They queued for hours, and sometimes even the meager allotments their coupons permitted ran out. Meanwhile, as everyone in Timişoara knew, on the outskirts lay one of Europe’s largest pork-processing plants. The town also had large local bread factories and other major food production facilities. Many Timişoarans labored in these plants, and they doubtless told others what was made in them and in what quantities. But much of this locally produced food, like everything else, was being exported for hard currency. The furious townsfolk, spending years shoulder to shoulder in queues, were united in their deprivation. But they could call upon no forms of social organization other than their churches, which were under Securitate surveillance. Their workplaces belonged to the regime. Furthermore, crowds on the streets were permitted only in connection with scripted holidays and soccer matches. In fact, back on November 15, following Romania’s defeat of Denmark in a World Cup qualifier in Bucharest, Timişoara’s streets had filled with elated fans, some of whom had apparently chanted “Down with Ceauşescu!” This unpublicized incident had indicated the potential for a wider conflagration if some thing set it off. That is exactly what the pastor’s principled, stubborn defiance had triggered on December 15.

On December 16, Timişoara’s mayor, summoned to intervene by the Securitate, arrived at the Reformed church with workmen to replace the shattered windows and with doctors to examine the pastor’s pregnant wife. In turn, the mayor requested that Tőkés instruct the crowd to disperse. In order to avoid bloodshed, the pastor agreed. But the crowd, by then much beyond his congregation, was in no mood to go home; some began accusing Tőkés of collaboration. Others assumed that his dispersal request resulted from pressure by the Securitate. Tőkés discovered himself a “prisoner” of the people’s anger. But “in that street,” recalled one eyewitness, “was a tension and a feeling of power that you could almost touch.” Both joyous and apprehensive, the gathering crowd began to relocate from the small church toward the city center, Opera Square, several blocks away. Having initially assembled to defend the ethnic Hungarian pastor, the crowd began singing the 1848 nationalist anthem, “Awake, Romanians.” Shop windows were smashed—the regime’s blackouts enabled some people to hurl rocks without being seen—and some chanted “Down with Ceauşescu!” “Down with tyranny!” “Freedom!” This lightning escalation—precisely what the appearance of the mayor had sought to preempt—had transpired in a single day.

It was the beginning of a political bank run.

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by | 26 June 2023 · 9:48 am

Missouri River Travelogue: ND

The first stops in North Dakota on our 4250-mile road trip up the Missouri River and back were the tiny towns of Hague and Strasburg, not because the latter was the hometown of Lawrence Welk (another German via Odessa), but because it contained one of several cemeteries in Emmons County that contained distinctive wrought-iron crosses, whose National Register of Historic Places listing in Wikipedia had no photos. The crosses were made by German-Russian blacksmiths in central North Dakota who developed individual styles and whose work was known for miles around.

Our next stop was in Bismarck at the North Dakota Heritage Center and State Museum, which had a special exhibit on Native American storytellers in addition to its many exhibits on natural history, including lots of dinosaurs whose fossils are abundant in the Dakotas.

On our way to Minot the next day, we stopped to photograph (for Wikipedia) historic (1885) Ingersoll School in Underwood and later to view the Garrison Dam and Lake Sakakawea, the largest water storage reservoir in the U.S. (Lake Oahe in SD is the second largest.) In Minot, where Ms. Outlier spent her college years, we visited the attractive Scandinavian Heritage Center.

The next day we drove US2 west to Williston, stopping at Stanley and Ross in Mountrail County to photograph two NRHP sites for Wikipedia: the (1937) Great Northern Railway Underpass (very helpful when long freight trains are passing) and the unexpected (1929) Assyrian Muslim Cemetery. The Great Northern Railway (now merged into BNSF) was extended from Minot as far as Tioga, ND, in 1887, thanks primarily to Japanese immigrant labor. (US2 follows the railroad.) It brought many immigrant settlers onto the northern plains and carried enormous quantities of grain out. In 1951, Amerada Petroleum Corporation (now Hess Corp) discovered oil near Tioga and the resulting oil boom has made Mountrail and Williams counties the richest in North Dakota. Nearly every large farm has an oil well on it.

That afternoon, we took ND1804 (named for the year Lewis and Clark went upriver) to Fort Buford Historical Site at the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, then drove farther to Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site right at the state line. (The parking lot is in Montana.) For dinner, we enjoyed big servings of northern pike at the Williston Brewing Company in the old but renovated El Rancho Hotel.

On our way back to Bismarck the next day, we drove through the north unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, with lovely vistas of the North Dakota Badlands, the Little Missouri River, and herds of bison. After a long drive on I-94, we had fish again for dinner that night with one of Ms. Outlier’s old school friends, and lunch with another on our way south on US83 the next day.

Halibut en papillote

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by | 22 June 2023 · 12:33 pm

Missouri River Travelogue: SD

Back on the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, we followed the Missouri River into South Dakota, stopping first at Vermillion to photograph the fine architecture of the University of South Dakota. We made another stop in downtown Yankton to visit the waterfront before driving across Gavins Point Dam to see the hydroelectric plant and the visitor center on the Nebraska side of the river. After many attempts, I managed to get a clean shot of one of the many pelicans fishing and basking there.

From there, we headed north to visit the Corn Palace and eat lunch at the Cattleman’s Club Steakhouse in Mitchell before stopping for the night at Huron, where Ms. Outlier was born. In Huron, we photographed the world’s largest pheasant and visited the State Fair Grounds, where we found a monument to La Société de Quarante Hommes et Huit Chevaux Grand du South Dakota (a.k.a. French Boxcar), whose history was entirely new to me. After our meaty lunch, we were not very hungry that evening, but the rich aroma of South Asian spices coming from the motel owner’s suite enticed us to walk to a neighboring steakhouse where we ordered salads and wine.

The next day, we drove up to Aberdeen, where we visited the Dakota Prairie Museum and other historic sites downtown, including a building that had collapsed under heavy snowfall in March. We had dinner with cousins and lunch the next day with Ms. Outlier’s last remaining aunt. Our convention-oriented Ramkota Motel was hosting several high school graduation parties. (The Super 8 motel chain originated in Aberdeen, but we were not impressed with it on an earlier visit there.)

On our way to Bismarck, ND, we passed through Leola, SD (Rhubarb Capital of the World), and Eureka, SD (Kuchen Capital), once filled with Germans from Bessarabia. Ms. Outlier’s German ancestors had a farm in Eureka but there was no sign of it now. They immigrated to the Dakotas from Neudorf, now called Carmanova in Transnistria. There is a Neudorf cemetery outside Eureka, but it is not accessible to the public.

On our way back downriver several days later, we overnighted at another, much emptier Ramkota Motel in pleasant little Pierre, SD, the second least populous state capital in the U.S. (Montpelier, VT, is smaller.) Its capitol building is modeled on the one in Helena, MT. We drove across the river to Fort Pierre to visit Oahe Dam, which generates power for Minnesota, Montana, and Nebraska, as well as the Dakotas. The Missouri River usually marks the boundary between the Central and Mountain time zones in the Dakotas, but all businesses in Fort Pierre observe Central time—except the bars, which allow patrons to enjoy another hour of drinking before Mountain closing time.

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by | 14 December 2022 · 2:46 am

Chornobyl, 988-1986

From A Journey into Russia, by Jens Mühling (Armchair Traveller series; Haus, 2015), Kindle Loc. 705ff:

The Yakushins were a family of priests. Nicholas’s great-grandfather had served in the Church of Saint Ilya, Nicholas’s grandfather as well. Then the Bolsheviks came. They hammered on the church door and cried: stop praying, Father; man has no soul. The grandfather did not agree: man, he said, most certainly has a soul, and it is immortal. The Bolsheviks detained the grandfather. When he was released, he was old. That was his good luck. He died early enough to escape Stalin’s terror, which hardly any clerics survived. The grandfather’s son, Nicholas Yakushin’s father, did not become a priest. The times were not right.

Nicholas was nevertheless baptised, secretly, at home, the way most Orthodox were. Those who baptised their children in the church had to reckon with work-related harassment. When Nicholas was born, shortly after the end of the war, the church was closed anyway; the local kolkhoz used it as a grain silo. Thus Nicholas got to know his forefathers’ church: filled to the dome with wheat. On the ceiling a besieged Christ faded away, his hands spread over the grain as if in self-protection, not in blessing.

The town of Chernobyl, or Chornobyl, in Ukrainian, is old, ancient, even if it does not look it anymore. None of the original buildings are left. First the Mongols razed the city; later came Lithuanians, Poles, Bolsheviks, finally the Germans. Today there are only a few wooden houses standing between the concrete blocks, none of them older than two centuries. But Chernobyl was founded at the same time as Kiev, and when prince Vladimir had his subjects baptised in the year 988, the citizens of Chernobyl were amongst the first Christians of the Slavic world.

To those for whom this past was still present – despite the futurist ecstasy of the Soviet period – it was no surprise that here, in Chernobyl, 1000 years after the Slavs’ baptism, time should come to an end, just as it had been proclaimed in the Book of Revelation:

The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. And a third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters, because they had been made bitter.

This John wrote in Chapter 8, verses 10 and 11. But in Ukrainian ‘wormwood’ means: Chornobyl [lit. ‘black stalk’, Artemisia vulgaris ‘common mugwort, wormwood’, to distinguish it from the lighter-stemmed wormwood A. absinthium].

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by | 23 October 2022 · 7:52 am

Romania’s Energy Crisis, 1984-85

From The New York Review of Books, 23 October 1986, by “a writer who frequently travels in Eastern Europe and whose name must be withheld”:

When it comes to political independence, the Romanians find out about it through rumors. They can judge the country’s energy independence from what they see. When darkness falls, the cities are plunged into shadow—paradise for burglars—and in the daytime, in some cities, buses run only between 6-8 AM and 3-5 PM. Electric energy and water services are interrupted daily, at irregular intervals and for periods that can exceed four hours. As a result, refrigerators defrost in the summer and in every season residents of Bucharest avoid using elevators so they won’t be caught between floors: elderly people laden with packages old grandmothers crying babies prepare for the return to their homes on the tenth or eleventh floors as though for a mountain climb. The strongest light bulb is forty watts, and it is illegal to use more than one lamp per room; television programming has been cut back to two hours during the working day; each official organization is allowed to use only a limited number of the cars assigned to it (of course, there are exceptions, but not in favor of emergency hospital ambulances).

The private use of cars is now banned for the winter months and during the remaining nine months the lines to buy limited amounts of gasoline can last from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The procession that crosses the city four times a day as the president moves between the presidential palace and the one in which he works is made up of nine cars, not to mention the unknown number of automobiles not officially part of the retinue but assigned to protect it. (A doctor I talked to said that if the presidential cortege were to be cut back to four automobiles and the gasoline thereby saved turned over to ambulances, dozens of people might be spared death each week.)

Some bolder citizens, I was told, began to complain and to say that the vaunted energy independence had gone far enough. They were wrong. The proof came with the polar temperatures of the winter of 1984-1985, when heat was virtually cut off in every city. At twenty below zero people were freezing at home and in theaters, and, most of all, in hospitals. Schools were closed; women who had to go to work in the morning learned to do their cooking after midnight, when the power would occasionally be turned back on for one or two hours, on forbidden electric plates: the fine for doing so is five thousand lei, equivalent to the average salary for two months.

The regime tried to alleviate the situation. By the late 1970s it had become clear that the replacement of the easygoing Shah by the inflexible Ayatollah in Iran would require, in Romania, the replacement of the easy flow of Iranian oil by something more dependable. Here the president’s philosophy—that history cannot really be changed without also changing geography—came into play. Ceausescu had earlier ordered construction of the canal from the Danube to the Black Sea, which soaked up immense sums of money but which foreign ships still refuse to use. He ordered the demolition of a third of Bucharest in order to build a new presidential palace flanked by a triumphal boulevard cutting across the entire city (2.5 million inhabitants). Now, in the same intrepid spirit, he issued the order that Romania was to become a great coal producer. In the country’s principal coal-producing region more than thirty thousand miners went on strike.

A new decree announced that henceforth the principal coal-producing regions would be elsewhere, nearer the president’s native village, where the local coal, according to experts I talked to, had a caloric-energy content below the economically or technologically tolerable limits. Although they did not go out on strike, the new miners did not prove to be up to the tasks assigned them. Thus the first version of the plan had called for a production level of 86 million tons of coal by 1985, its second version set a goal of 64 million, whereas the reported actual production was 44 million. In the end, energy independence based on Romanian coal turned out to be not all that different from energy independence based on Iranian oil.

One might think that the Romanian energy shortage is the worst on the Continent. Nothing could be more erroneous. During the late 1970s, when they were still obtainable, official statistical data showed that at that time Romania’s electrical energy output—2,764 kilowatt hours—was nearly equal to that of Italy, greater than that of Hungary (2,196 kilowatt hours), Spain, and Yugoslavia, twice that of Portugal, etc. If, notwithstanding, such signs of extreme energy shortage were not being observed in Lisbon, but were all-too-evident in Bucharest, this is because Romania, instead of squandering its electrical energy on the needs of its people, was allocating it to industries that consume large amounts of energy.

Given its mineral resources, Romania’s iron and steel industry had never been very efficient. ln 1965, when Ceausescu came to power, it already had the remarkable steel-production rate of 180 kilos per capita, each year. Under the new leader, that figure in fifteen years took a jump that few economies have ever managed to duplicate: over 600 kilos of steel per capita in 1980—in other words, more than France, Great Britain, East Germany, or the United States.

Unfortunately, however, the rapid expansion of the Romanian steel industry occurred at a time when established Western iron and steel industries were sharply cutting their production and the international steel market was collapsing. As a result, today Romania is suffering from an imbalance between its capacity to produce steel and its ability to make use of it. A newcomer has a hard time finding out a place for itself on the market when even old-timers are overproducing. To do so successfully, there is not much choice: one either relies on technology to improve the quality of the product or one relies on economic measures to bring about a substantial reduction in price. Thus it was hardly surprising to see Romanian producers being accused of dumping steel on the market, and the American market at that. The Romanian iron and steel industry went right on producing mountains of steel that its domestic industries were unable to digest and that the international market did not seem keen to acquire.

The Far Outliers spent the grim winter of 1983-84 in Romania, and that was bad enough. We had a 4-burner gas stove that only supplied enough gas to keep one burner lit at a time. Hot water hours were limited to two in the evening and one in the morning. And our radiators were barely warm. Romania seems only to have gotten worse after we left.

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