Azerbaijan Is Rich. Now It Wants to Be Famous

Azerbaijan Is Rich. Now It Wants to Be Famous.

By PETER SAVODNIK

The New York Times Magazine – 8/2/2013


In March 2010, Ibrahim Ibrahimov was on the three-hour Azerbaijan

Airlines flight from Dubai to Baku when he had a vision. `I wanted to

build a city, but I didn't know how,' Ibrahimov recalled.

`I closed my eyes, and I began to imagine this project.' Ibrahimov,

one of the richest men in Azerbaijan, is 54 and has a round, leathery

face with millions of tiny creases kneaded in his brow and the spaces

beneath his eyes. He walks the way generals walk when they arrive in

countries that they have recently occupied. In the middle of his

reverie, Ibrahimov summoned the flight attendant. `I asked for some

paper, but there wasn't any. So I grabbed this shirt in my bag that I

hadn't tried on. I took the tissue paper out, and in 20 minutes I drew

the whole thing.'

Once he arrived in Baku, Ibrahimov went straight to his architects and

said, `Draw this exactly the way I did.' Avesta Concern, the company

that governs his various business interests, subsequently commissioned

the blueprints for Ibrahimov's vision. The result will be a sprawling,

lobster-shaped development called Khazar Islands - an archipelago of

55 artificial islands in the Caspian Sea with thousands of apartments,

at least eight hotels, a Formula One racetrack, a yacht club, an

airport and the tallest building on earth, Azerbaijan Tower, which

will rise 3,445 feet.

When the whole project is complete, according to Avesta, 800,000

people will live at Khazar Islands, and there will be hotel rooms for

another 200,000, totaling nearly half the population of Baku. It will

cost about $100 billion, which is more than the gross domestic product

of most countries, including Azerbaijan. `It will cost $3 billion just

to build Azerbaijan Tower,' Ibrahimov said. =80=9CSome people may

object. I don't care. I will build it alone. I work with my

feelings.'

It's not surprising that Ibrahimov, who plans to live in the penthouse

of Azerbaijan Tower, had his epiphany on a flight from Dubai. The

vision behind Khazar Islands, after all, is not a vision so much as a

simulacrum of a vision. The fake islands, the thousands of palm trees

and the glass and steel towers - many of which resemble Dubai's

sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel =80' are all emblems of the modern

Persian Gulf petro-dictatorship. And two decades after the collapse of

the Soviet Union - its final custodian during 23 centuries of

near-constant occupation - Azerbaijan could be accused of having

similar ambitions. The country, which is about the size of South

Carolina, has 9.2 million people and is cut off from any oceans. It

builds nothing that the rest of the world wants and has no

internationally recognized universities. It does, however, have oil.

In 2006, Azerbaijan started pumping crude from its oil field under the

Caspian Sea through the new Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. Now, with

the help of BP and other foreign energy companies, one million barrels

of oil course through the pipeline daily, ending at a Turkish port on

the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea. This makes

Azerbaijan a legitimate energy power (the world's leading oil

producer, Saudi Arabia, produces 11 million barrels every day) with a

great deal of potential. If the proposed Nabucco pipeline, running

from Turkey to Austria, is built, Azerbaijan would become a conduit

for gas reserves, linking Central Asia to Europe. This could strip

Russia, which sells the European Union more than a third of the gas it

consumes, of one of its most potent foreign-policy levers. It could

also generate billions of dollars every year for Azerbaijan, which

between 2006 and 2008 had the world's fastest-growing economy, at an

average pace of 28 percent annually.

Sitting on a couch in the temporary headquarters at the construction

site of his future city, Ibrahimov mulled the possibilities. The

headquarters, which looks like a very modern log cabin, features a big

conference table, flat-screen televisions, a bar, pretty assistants

and a dining table that is always set. There is a gargantuan portrait

of the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, hanging from a wall,

next to the bar. Spread out on the conference table were blueprints

for Khazar Islands, which looked like battle plans. Men in leather

jackets picked from crystal bowls filled with nuts and dried fruit and

caramels in shiny wrappers.

Ibrahimov had slept five hours, he said, but was not tired. He started

the day with an hourlong run, followed by a dip in the Caspian Sea,

followed by a burst of phone calls over breakfast, followed by

meetings with some people from the foreign ministry, then the Turks,

then his engineers and architects. Now, while sipping tea, Ibrahimov's

attention was back on Khazar Islands, which he insisted was not

modeled after Dubai. `Dubai is a desert,' he said.

`The Arabs built an illusion of a country. The Palm' - a faux-island

development in Dubai - `is not right. The water smells. Also, they

built very deep in the sea. That's dangerous. The Palm is beautiful to

look at, but it's not good to live in.'

Ibrahimov paused and took a sip of tea. The tiny creases of his face

bunched up under his eyes, which looked off into the distance, out the

tiny window of the faux log cabin, toward the construction site. He

said that he was put off by the inorganic feel of Dubai, the sense

that it was so . . . ephemeral. `Everything,' he said dismissively,

=80=9Cis artificial.'

Few countries have come as far in mastering the art of geopolitics as

Azerbaijan. After being occupied by Cyrus the Great, Alexander the

Great, the Seljuks, the Mongols, the Persians, the Russians, the

Ottomans and, finally, the Soviets, Azerbaijan, which achieved its

independence in 1991, has cultivated relationships with the United

States and many European countries and deepened relations with Russia

and key Central Asian `stans.' These days, Azerbaijan, which is

overwhelmingly Muslim, buys advanced weapons systems from Israel in

return for oil. A new member of the United Nations Security Council,

the country sided with the United States against Russia last year on a

resolution condemning Syria. `This is a very small country on a very

significant piece of real estate,' says Matthew Bryza, the former

U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan. `Azerbaijan pursues a very realpolitik

policy.'

In the old days, they came for geography (Azerbaijan is perched on the

Caspian). About a century ago, they started coming for oil. Then,

after the Soviet Union collapsed, the energy sector became a source of

enormous wealth. Now Azerbaijan is trying to take advantage of that

wealth.

As such, Avesta's sales and marketing team recently produced a

gleaming 101-page coffee-table book in a gilded box promoting Khazar

Islands. It features photographs of men in Italian suits and women

with pouty faces;

everyone drinks wine and is on a cigarette boat or in a Mercedes

convertible. There's also a video that shows computer renderings of

Khazar Islands in the not-too-distant future. The video lasts 5

minutes 6 seconds and includes an image of a make-believe skyline at

night and another of Ibrahimov on a cellphone in front of a private

jet, even though, he conceded, he doesn't own one.

Two things about the video are striking. First, there isn't any

information about asking prices, square footage, move-in dates or why

anyone would want to live in Baku. And then there's the soundtrack,

which is a synthesized blast of violins, harps, horns and snare drums

that makes you feel as if you're riding a stallion in the desert in

the 1980s.

The day before my three-hour flight from Moscow to Baku last spring,

Avesta's sales and marketing director at the time, Kenan Guluzade,

flew to the Russian capital to hand-deliver the book and DVD to me at

a Starbucks. Guluzade said he had to be in Russia anyway, but he was

also worried that, as a journalist, I might not get into

Azerbaijan. Guluzade came with his assistant and his father, who

sported an elegant, silk scarf and a tailored jacket. Guluzade spoke

quickly, in English. `It's really nice to feel attention to our

construction project,' he said, and then he handed me a fancy shopping

bag with the DVD and the book. His father sipped a latte. `The new

Baku is stunning,' his father said. Then Guluzade said: =80=9CThis is

true. It's amazing what is happening.'

When I arrived in Baku, the first of the Khazar Islands had already

been plunked down, and the first few apartment buildings were going

up. The entrance featured a menacing, falconlike archway. Boulevards

and traffic circles had been paved, and there were long strips of palm

trees - `Mr. Ibrahimov loves palm trees,' Nigar Huseynli, Ibrahimov's

assistant, said - and everywhere there seemed to be mounds of earth

and retaining walls and the concrete outlines of future cineplexes and

shopping malls. Amrahov Hasrat, who was the chief engineer at Khazar

Islands, told me that 200 trucks brought in rocks every day from a

bluff eight miles away. `We are destroying the mountain,' Hasrat said,

pointing off into the distance in the direction of a hill, `and taking

the rocks back to the sea to build the artificial islands.'

In some ways, though, reality is already taking shape. When Guluzade

met me in Starbucks, 96 apartments had been sold. Two days later, that

figure inched up to 102. Now, it's 136. The asking prices run from

about $280 to $460 per square foot, meaning a typical 1,076-sqare-foot

apartment at Khazar Islands starts around $300,000. Ibrahimov expects

geometric growth after 2015, when they're scheduled to break ground on

Azerbaijan Tower.

Western financial analysts and real estate developers are

understandably skeptical. For one thing, there's President Ilham

Aliyev's regime, which opposes political competition and other reforms

that would diversify its economy and spur the long-term growth needed

for this kind of mega-project. There's the fact that no one has ever

tried anything this ambitious in Azerbaijan. Finally, this is a rough

neighborhood. The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, an autonomous region

within the country, raged between Azerbaijan and Armenia from 1988 to

1994 and has never really been resolved. Russia could invade Georgia,

as it did in 2008. There's the chance of an American or Israeli strike

on Iran, Azerbaijan's southern neighbor. Last month, riots raged for

two days in Azerbaijan as people protested local corruption in

Ismayilli.

Yet Ibrahimov, sitting behind the blueprints in his log cabin,

remained extremely optimistic. Azerbaijan, with its new money and

undeveloped coastline, offers `biznessmen' from the former Soviet

Union - a group that might be defined as importers, exporters,

government officials who dabble in the private sector, people who

aspire to be Ibrahim Ibrahimov - an affordable nearby playground. As

of late 2011, according to WealthInsight, a market research provider,

there were nearly 160,000 so-called high-net-worth individuals in

Russia alone, with a combined worth of nearly $1 trillion. Even

Turkmenistan, the North Korea of the former Soviet Union, is building

a luxury development, Avaza, which also has fake islands and

reportedly will cost $5 billion and sit on the Caspian's eastern

flank.

It was crucial, Ibrahimov told me, to visualize what everything will

look like in 2022, when Khazar Islands is supposed to be finished. He

pointed outside the small window, to the sea. =80=9CThat is where it

will be,' he said, referring to Azerbaijan Tower. `In the water. Can

you see it?'

Some in Baku already can. Indeed, the most crucial factor underpinning

the project is that President Aliyev's regime seems to want Khazar

Islands built. Ilgar Mammadov, chairman of the pro-democracy

Republicanist Alternative Movement, characterized Khazar Islands as an

inexorable beast. The country's international strategic monetary

reserves are now more than $46 billion, Mammadov said, and in 10

years, as oil and gas revenue rise, they could be near $150

billion. `Azerbaijan has the capacity to build the tallest building,'

Mammadov said, a hint of lamentation in his voice. `That's not in

doubt. We will create this big building, and then it will, by itself,

by the very mere fact of its existence, bring cash. How will that

work? Nobody knows.'

Ibrahimov was sitting in the back seat of a black Rolls-Royce as it

tore across island No. 1 of his soon-to-be built archipelago. Nigar

Huseynli, his 23-year-old assistant, was sitting up front in a black

and white floral-print skirt, black tights and rectangular black

sunglasses. She seemed to be vaguely worried, always. She wore a great

deal of perfume that, she said, came from Italy. `When he's in

Azerbaijan,' Huseynli said, =80=9CMr. Ibrahimov always drives in his

black Rolls-Royce. In Dubai, he has a red one.'

Before I arrived in Baku, Huseynli tried to convey just how much power

Ibrahimov wields in his country. But it wasn't obvious until I landed

at Heydar Aliyev International Airport and showed the passport-control

officers a letter from Huseynli stating that I would be meeting with

Ibrahimov. The letter included Ibrahimov's name and signature at the

bottom, and it seemed to frighten, shock and amaze all at once. A

crowd of guards and customs agents gathered around and stared in

silence.

Ibrahimov seems to be vaguely aware of the numinous glow that

envelopes him. He is supremely concrete, focused on things like

buildings, cars, hand-held devices, jeans or which country he'd like

to be in right now, but in a manner that suggests he can have

whichever of those things he desires most. As the Rolls sped past

large knots of men in hard hats and jumpsuits, he sent text messages

and juggled cellphones. His son called. Then the Qatari

ambassador. Then someone who annoyed him. A television screen

positioned three feet in front of the seat that Ibrahimov always sits

in blared music videos, and some girl group was singing a two-minute

riff called `Take Me Away.'

Ibrahimov, who sported blue Stefano Ricci crocodile-skin shoes that

matched his blue Stefano Ricci jeans, blue Zilli jacket and blue Zilli

button-down shirt, tapped his foot arrhythmically. Every time I

started to ask a question or he started to answer, there was a call or

an incoming message. Occasionally Ibrahimov said something random that

could be mistaken for something profound: `I live very simply,' or `My

favorite places are France and Turkey.' When Ibrahimov talks about

himself, he hews to platitudes about, say, family (`it is important')

or how to get ahead in ex-communist countries (`instinct'). They are

lessons he seems to have internalized. Ibrahimov was born in a village

in the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic, a sliver of Azerbaijan wedged

between Armenia and Iran. He has four brothers and two sisters. He

called his father a `good Soviet' and a major influence in his life,

but some suspect that Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijan's previous president,

played a more important role.

Aliyev, a former Politburo member, also came from Nakhichevan. In

1991, he became de facto leader of the autonomous republic, just as

the Soviet Union was falling apart and Ibrahimov was starting his

first business, a limited-liability corporation called Ilkan. It's

unclear what Ilkan made or sold - Ibrahimov said only that he made his

first million, in 1992, in the furniture business =80' but in the

early '90s, according to Avesta company literature, Ibrahimov built a

three-story headquarters for Ilkan in Nakhichevan, which would

probably have been very hard without support from someone

powerful. Then, in 1993, Aliyev became president of Azerbaijan, and in

1996, Ibrahimov began Avesta. `Mr. Ibrahimov has always had very good

relations with the government,' Guluzade, Khazar Islands' former

marketing director, told me.

Today Avesta oversees Ibrahimov's many smaller companies. Some of

these companies do things that seem to actually support Ibrahimov's

larger, development-related projects (building things, hauling

equipment, clearing debris). Others, like the Azerbaijan-Iran Gunel

Joint Enterprise, suggest more political interests. Opposition figures

say that Ibrahimov owes much of what he has to the Aliyev family, but

when I asked Ibrahimov about this, he shrugged. He said Avesta is not

only a corporation but also a philanthropy, building water pipelines

and mosques for poor villagers. He called Heydar Aliyev, who died in

2003, his inspiration, and he made a point of saying, more than once,

that he likes Aliyev's son, the current president, very much and

thinks that he is guiding his country toward a more glorious and

profitable future.

As Ibrahimov spoke, the Rolls trundled over an unpaved road. He

maintained, always, the outlines of a barely discernible grin, and

every few seconds he would point at something that wasn't there but he

could already see perfectly, that had been part of his vision. The

Azerbaijan Tower, he proclaimed, would definitely be in Guinness World

Records, and if the Saudis or Emiratis or anyone anywhere tried to

build a bigger building, then he would build an even bigger one.

I asked him if there was anything Freudian about all these

skyscrapers. He didn't reply. Then suddenly, Ibrahimov blurted a

series of unprompted factoids in his faux-profound style. First, `One

hundred and fifty bridges are planned for Khazar Islands.' Then, in

what seemed like a reference to his love of yachts: `Today the Caspian

is only used for oil, but it's not right.' Huseynli pointed at a

cluster of recently planted palm trees. This seemed to cheer him up.

On some level, there is an economic logic behind building the tallest,

biggest, brashest building anywhere. The rise of superdevelopments in

cities like Doha, Riyadh, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai - and, of course, Abu

Dhabi and Dubai - sent signals to investors that the state supported

growth. Usually, these sorts of developments attract the attention,

first, of regional investors who know the local topography, which

Khazar Islands has already done. `They're coming from Russia, Ukraine,

Georgia, the Arabic countries and especially from Israel,' Guluzade

told me. Next are the more skeptical international investors that

Ibrahimov is hoping to impress. Hence the Azerbaijan Tower. `The

investor is faced with this battery of choices,' explained Brian

Connelly, a strategic-management professor at Auburn University's

College of Business. `But there are things they can't see, so they're

looking for a signal that tells them this is good for them. If I can

see that there's the tallest building in the world, I know the

host-country institutions are behind them.'

Riding around in the Rolls, I couldn't tell whether Ibrahimov was

indeed a brilliant strategist or someone who just had the capital to

create a vision on a piece of tissue paper and turn it into a

construction project. Or perhaps both. As we neared the site of what

will be the ritziest restaurant at Khazar Islands, he became very

excited. The concrete and aluminum skeleton of the restaurant

resembles a Viking helmet, and when it's done, it will include a

microbrewery, which Ibrahimov mentioned two or three times. `We have a

guy from Austria,' he said. Nearby, there were more men in hard hats

and jumpsuits, and trucks carting rocks. =80=9CIn my head,' he said,

`this project is already done.'

Ibrahimov is not the only developer in Baku, and Khazar Islands is not

the only major development. Flame Towers, which features three

flamelike towers, includes a five-star hotel and, at night, will be

lighted in red. The Heydar Aliyev Center, designed by Zaha Hadid,

includes a museum and looks a little like the starship

Enterprise. Baku White City will encompass 500-plus acres of new

apartments and parking lots and is supposed to be the opposite of

Black City, where the oil barons built their refineries a century

ago. Finally, there's Crystal Hall, a 23,000-seat arena overlooking

the Caspian.

Nearly three years after Ibrahimov's initial vision on the Azerbaijan

Airlines flight, Khazar Islands has grown to 4 fake islands, 1 bridge

and 13 apartment buildings. All this development can feel a bit weird,

or at least incongruous. As the Rolls careered through the outskirts

of Baku, Ibrahimov became quiet. Unlike the United Arab Emirates,

which was, until recently, a desert, Baku has a rich architectural

history, with centuries-old mansions, mosques, palaces, squares and

esplanades. (Some sites date to at least the seventh century.) Baku

has a grace and cosmopolitanism; it feels like an amalgam of Paris and

Istanbul, albeit dustier. It also feels like a gateway to the East,

distant places, mythologies and many other things that the new

Azerbaijan doesn't have much appetite for. I interpreted Ibrahimov's

silence as a sign of melancholy, but in the front seat, Huseynli, who

was fielding calls on two or possibly three cellphones, each with its

own hip-hop ring tone, turned around excitedly. Glancing at the beige

facades, the narrow streets, the old women selling apricots and nuts

and pirated DVDs, she said: `All of this soon will be gone.

Then we will have a new city. I like the old, of course, the

historic. . . . But this will be gone, and then it will be a different

country.'

When we pulled up to the Avesta Concern Tower, in central Baku,

several men in tweed jackets were assembled on the curb and ready to

escort us inside. After lunch in Ibrahimov's private dining room, we

decamped to the office and sat on a red silk divan with miniature

Sphinx armrests. Ibrahimov pointed out his artifacts: his desk, which,

he said, is Spanish and the same kind used by Vladimir Putin; a chess

set from Italy; a sculpture of his father.

Ibrahimov segued back to Ilham Aliyev, the Boss of All Bosses, whom he

called a great supporter, an ally, the son of the savior of the people

of Azerbaijan. I asked him about other features of his regime: the

lack of transparency, the lack of civil liberties, the detention of

opposition activists. Ibrahimov said what oligarchs have been saying

since Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian industrialist, was exiled to

Siberia in 2003: `I don't know anything about politics.' But

=80=9Cbiznessmen' are much more intimately woven into the political

fabric of Russia or Azerbaijan than C.E.O.'s in the West. They may

wear crocodile-skin shoes, but they rely on the state for pipelines

and extraction rights.

Ibrahimov, like other successful men in this part of the world, knows

his place, and he knows it is best to be philosophical about these

things. `Don't ask me about politics,' he said. `I'm afraid I'll make

a mistake. This is not what I'm good at. This is not what I do.' Then

his semismile semiwidened, and he started talking about his next big

idea, which features more stratospheric buildings and superlong canals

and eight-star hotel-palaces and heliports and yacht clubs. He was

sure all these things could be done. He knew it. There were important

people - `political people,' he said - who support him.

Peter Savodnik is the author of `The Interloper,' a book about Lee

Harvey Oswald in the Soviet Union, to be published in October.

Editor: Jon Kelly