Nowhere does Azerbaijan look less like a 21st-century energy powerhouse than in the township of Balakhani, just north of Baku. Here hundreds of rusted and decrepit pumps suck the last remaining barrels out of the nearly exhausted fields. Balakhani is also home to the vast and smoldering city dump, through the length of which run oil pipes. This is where the modern oil industry began in the nineteenth century. These are the fields Hitler was after when he sent his Sixth Army south to Stalingrad. As Azeris like to point out, if it wasn’t for the arrival of the Red Army in 1920, Balakhani and the other fields of the Absheron peninsula would have set their country on a path to becoming the Riyadh of Transcaucasia. Or maybe its Dubai. Anything but what Azerbaijan became.