1. New York Times, December 26, 1991.

2. Interview with Valery Graifer.

3. Vagit Alekperov, introduction to Dobycha, the first Russian edition of The Prize.

4. Yegor Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire: Lessons for Modern Russia, trans. Antonina Bouis (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2007), p. 102.

5. Interview with Mikhail Gorbachev, Commanding Heights; Thane Gustafson, Crises Amid Plenty: The Politics of Soviet Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 103–36.

6. Gaidar, Collapse of an Empire, pp. 105–9, 239.

7. Interview with Yegor Gaidar; Thane Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune: The Politics of Russian Oil Under Yeltsin and Putin (forthcoming), p. 10 (government computers); Anders Aslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007), p. 107 (“wildly”).

8. Gustafson, Wheels of Fortune, p. 1.

9. Interview with Vagit Alekperov (“revelation”); Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune, pp. 5–14, 54 (“destroying the oil sector”); Vagit Alekperov, Oil of Russia: Past, Present, and Future (Minneapolis: East View Press, 2011), p. 324.

10. Alekperov, Oil of Russia, p. 326; Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), ch. 6.

11. Interview with Vagit Alekperov (“hardest thing”); Alekperov, introduction to Dobycha (“Soviet legacy”); Gustafson, Wheel of Fortune, p. 38 (walk to work).

12. Chrystia Freeland, Sale of the Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolution (London: Abacus, 2009), pp. 114–23, ch. 8; David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealthand Power in the New Russia (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), chs. 5, 12.

13. Freeland, Sale of the Century, pp. 187, 384; Hoff man, The Oligarchs, ch. 18; Mikhail Fridman, “How I Became an Oligarch,” Speech, Lvov, November 14, 2010.

14. Interviews with Archie Dunham and Lucio Noto.

15. Interview with Archie Dunham.

16. Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2010.

17. John Browne, Beyond Business (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010), ch. 8.

18. John Browne, pp. 144–51; German Khan interview in Vedomosti, January 20, 2010.

19. Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of the Revolution (Potomac Books, 2007), chs. 15, 17; Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President (New York: Public Affairs, 2000); Angela Stent, “An Energy Superpower” in Kurt Campbell and Jonathon Price, The Politics of Global Energy (Washington, D. C.: Aspen Institute, 2008), pp. 78, 95.

20. Igor Sechin, Presentation to Financial Analysts, New York City, April 18, 2012; Putin in The Economist, September 3, 2011.

21. BP and Rosneft press conference, March 21, 2013.

1. Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1994), p. 1.

2. New York Times, April 26, 2005.

3. Strobe Talbott, “A Farewell to Flashman: American Policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia,” speech, July 21, 1997.

4. New York Times, October 4, 1998 (“our strategy”); Jan Kalicki, “Caspian Energy at the Crossroads,” Foreign Affairs, September – October 2001.

5. Robert Tolf, The Russian Rockefellers: The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil Industry (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1976), pp. xiv (“Russian Rockefeller”), 53–55; Steve LeVine, The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 146; Ronald Suny, “A Journeyman for the Revolution: Stalin and the Labor Movement in Baku,” Soviet Studies, no. 3, 1972; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Young Stalin (New York: Vintage, 2008), p. 187 (“the Oil Kingdom”).

6. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Free Press, 2009), p. 220 (“The Bolsheviks will be cleared”); Geoffrey Jones, The State and the Emergence of the British Oil Industry (London: Macmillan, 1981), pp. 209–11 (Bolsheviks); Alexander Stahlberg, Bounden Duty: The Memoirs of a German Officer, 1932–1945, trans. Patrica Crampton (London: Brassey’s, 1990), pp. 226–27 (“Baku oil”).

7. LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, pp. 50–51; Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Crude Face of Global Capitalism,” New York Times, Sunday Magazine, October 4, 1998.

8. LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, p. 209 “all roads”; Terry Adams, “Baku Oil Diplomacy and ‘Early Oil’ 1994–1998: An External Perspective,” in Azerbaijan in Global Politics: Crafting Foreign Policy (Baku: Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy, 2009), p. 228 (“disruptive”).

9. LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, p. 179 (“native son”); Heydar Aliyev, interview, Azerbaijan International, Winter 1994, pp. 7–9 (“core leadership”).

10. Adams, “Baku Oil Diplomacy,” p. 2 (“Mission Impossible”).

11. “Early Oil Northor West,” Report, n. d.

12. Interview with Jan Kalicki.

13. LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, p. 350.

14. John Browne, speech, CERA “Tale of Three Seas” Conference, June 20, 2001; Frank Verrastro, “Caspian and Central Asia: Lessons Learned from the BTC Experience,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, White Paper, April 2009 (“arrange and negotiate”).

15. David Woodward to author (fax machine).

16. Nick Butler, “Energy: The Changing World Order,” speech, July 5, 2006 (“engineering project”); Washington Post, October 4, 1998 (“real country”).

1. Nursultan Nazarbayev, The Kazakhstan Way, trans. Jan Butler (London: Stacey International, 2008), pp. 88–89; Steve LeVine, The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea (New York: Random House, 2007), pp. 97–100.

2. Nazarbayev, The Kazakhstan Way, p. 93 (“raw materials”); LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, p. 92 (“frozen in time”).

3. LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, pp. 93–94.

4. Yegor Gaidar, Days of Defeat and Victory, trans. Jane Ann Miller (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), p. 39 (“trump card”); Nazarbayev, The Kazakhstan Way, pp. 1, 112 (“coma,” “fundamental principle”); Nursultan Nazarbayev, Without Right and Left (London: Class Publishing, 1992), p. 148 (“appendage”); LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, p. 117.

5. Nazarbayev, The Kazakhstan Way, pp. 95–96 (“contract,” Yeltsin); interview with Richard Matzke; LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, p. 239 (“prolonged and bitter”); Washington Post, October 6, 1998 (“their oil”).

6. LeVine, The Oil and the Glory, p. 253.

7. Interviews with Ronald Freeman, Lucio Noto, and Jan Kalicki.

8. Interview with Richard Matzke.

9. The Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2007; Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, October 18, 2010.

10. Kabildyn cited a book… need to searchout…

11. John J. Maresca, testimony, U. S. House of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, February 12, 1998 (“Central Asia,” cost-effectiveness); Interview with John Imle and Marty Miller; Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), pp. 309–10.