The slim corridor that some Azeris call the Belt of Happiness starts at Baku’s Heydar Aliyev International airport. The new road into town is as black and shiny as the vast pools of oil that paid for it, as well as for everything else in Azerbaijan. And what oil doesn’t pay to fix, it pays to hide. Sand-colored concrete walls line the highway, but through their latticed arabesques you can just make out the woeful shacks behind them.
The Belt of Happiness widens out as it winds near the Caspian into Baku. Big luxury hotels and massive apartment high-rises, many still under construction, crowd the coastline. White 4x4’s career erratically along the broad avenue. Police cars are everywhere, but their idea of traffic control is to yammer belligerently through their loudspeakers. This has virtually no effect.
You’d be crazy to try to cross the street, and few do. A series of marble-lined subterranean walkways is the only prudent way to get across. On one side of the passageways sits a leafy esplanade that runs along Baku Bay, its kebab cafes and children’s parks scattered among imported palm and olive trees. Out where the esplanade ends, an immense 23,000-square-foot Azerbaijan flag flops from a 531-foot-high flagpole; it was meant to set the world flagpole record, and it did until Tajikistan topped it by about 10 feet last year. (The affront is said to have caused the Azerbaijan president, Ilham Aliyev, to boycott a scheduled conference in Tajikistan.)
On the other side of Neftchilar Avenue — it means Oil Workers’ Avenue in Azeri — lies the heart of the happiness belt. Designer boutiques stud the grand Beaux-Arts buildings, a reminder that Baku also had the world’s first oil boom, over a century ago. High fashion is in full flower, at least behind the glass vitrines. Tiffany, Gucci, Dior, Bottega Veneta, Burberry, Etro, YSL — the global gang’s all here.
It seemed funny to stumble across this amalgam of the Avenue Montaigne, Sloane Street and Fifth Avenue in a place where the traditional fashion statement is a huge shaggy sheepskin hat. But Baku is the fashion frontier: Azeris have seen fashion speeding across the sky, and whatever it is, they want it. Yet globalization doesn’t just standardize desire from place to place; it also makes it vaguer and more diffuse. And so Neftchilar Avenue can look as if the country just got an airlift of good taste, even if no one asks what those two words — “good” and “taste” — mean. Indeed, fashion attitudes here are still as narrow as the happiness belt. As my wife and I strolled down the esplanade, we noticed groups of young Azeris — usually all girls or all boys — tittering at us. Someone finally explained it: men in shorts are homosexuals, and women smoking cigarettes in public are prostitutes.
A store called Emporium, right next to the new Bentley dealership, sells some 250 brands, along with art books, fashion magazines and whatever music is popular in the hippest European dance clubs. It’s a handsome store on three levels: clean, bright and agreeable to browse. You could easily imagine yourself in Paris’s snazzy Colette shop — an impression underscored by the complete absence of anything remotely native to Azeri culture.
“We have no local fashion designers and we have no local fashion customs,” says Aziz Balayev, the business development manager for Sinteks, the Azeri company that owns Emporium. “We even have to hire international agencies to do our display windows. We just don’t have anyone here at the taste level we need.”
What the Azeris do have is what they’ve always had since the time of Zoroaster. Parts of the country almost float on oil, and you can smell it in the air around the bay.
At the turn of the 20th century,
Baku was pumping half the world’s oil and foreign investors were piling in, Sweden’s Nobel brothers the most notable.
Baku had a cosmopolitan flair even then. The national history museum occupies what was once the majestic mansion of Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, the son of a shoemaker who bought land near Baku, struck oil in 1878 and woke up the next morning one of the richest men in the world.
Taghiyev’s opulent but sober apartments, preserved in a wing of the museum, belonged to a man with a strong sense of place — they were decorated by foreign artisans, but also contained Islamic arches and slender columns. “They used to call this Old Baku, but now everything around here is new,” said a museum guide named Nermin, looking out the front door of Taghiyev’s mansion. “We don’t like it. It could be any place.”
New Baku was born yesterday. The Soviets pretty much killed the oil industry when they took over Azerbaijan in 1920, but now, the three wavy Flame Towers flicker every night with the light of 10,000 L.E.D.’s, an emblem of the city and an electronic beacon to the world: Baku is back and pumping again. In 2005, the first oil from its 7-billion-barrel reserves started flowing through the $4 billion Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline to the West. Azerbaijan’s G.D.P. exploded from $7 billion in 2000 to over $63 billion last year.
Some of that windfall has trickled down to what could be called the haplessness belt, but not enough to make much of a difference. Many Azeris remain terribly poor. “I would love to shop in Gucci, but then I wouldn’t eat for several months,” a waiter at a fancy kebab restaurant told me wistfully.
The big money stays at the narrow top. It supports a system of crony capitalism and payoffs to keep rival clans happy. Graft and corruption are the norm. Azerbaijan ranks 143 out of 182 countries on Transparency International’s perceived corruption index, with a score of 2.4 out of 10.
Much of the nation’s income is off the books, some of it skimmed from unreported imports — like shoes and handbags. Between 2003 and 2009, for instance, Italy recorded exports to Azerbaijan of roughly $1.6 billion; during the same period, Azerbaijan recorded imports from Italy of $857 million. Gubad Ibadoglu, a Baku economist who has researched the phenomenon, figures that Azerbaijan’s shadow economy is about two-thirds as big as its official economy.
The man in charge of passing out the chips here is Ilham Aliyev, who succeeded his father Heydar as president in 2003. Ilham and his well-groomed wife and daughters stage-manage a system that Murad Gassanly, a member of Azerbaijan’s small, beleaguered opposition, calls “consumer authoritarianism.” Gassanly says he and his friends used to play a game called I Bet It’s Ilham: you flip TV channels at random and wager whether Aliyev’s photo will be on-screen.
Aliyev’s wife, Mehriban, a Caucasian Sophia Loren, uses her own considerable airtime to set the nation’s dress code. “Lots of women want to look like Mehriban, wear their hair like her, see what she’s buying and buy things that look like them at the cheap Sadarak mall outside town,” says Khadija Ismailova, perhaps Azerbaijan’s most outspoken journalist.
Aliyev’s daughter Leyla functions as a roving ambassador for Baku cool, and if such a thing does not actually exist, it is not for want of Leyla’s tireless stumping. She is the nominal editor for Baku International, a glossy art and fashion quarterly produced under contract by Condé Nast, and she sponsors traveling exhibits for Azerbaijani artists. She sculptured a large painted heart on display in downtown Baku and painted a straightforward rendering of zebras that hangs in the state-owned modern art museum. Some people say she also owns a good many of Neftchilar’s boutiques; others believe they really belong to her Russian pop star husband.
Aliyev’s dream is to give Baku the surface sheen of a world capital without passing through any of the stages normally required to be one. “Azerbaijan wants to catch up very quickly by having the accouterments that you find in Paris or New York,” says Michael Ross, a U.C.L.A. political science professor who recently wrote “The Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations.” “They are still worse off than Serbia or Belarus, but the more quickly they can resemble New York, the more quickly they can feel like they’re for real.”
Suddenly the designer boutiques along Neftchilar Avenue start to make more sense. They aren’t really meant to be viable business concerns. They’re more like the charms in Baku’s charm bracelet — fashion accessories in their own right. Baku wants designer boutiques the same way a woman might want the handbag for sale inside.
Baku isn’t the only place this is happening. Fashion retailing used to follow local demographics. An educated elite was good, but a booming middle class, like, say, in China or India, was even better. Now natural resources alone are enough. Around the Caspian corner from Azerbaijan lies Kazakhstan, an immense chunk of Central Asia with 17 million people and a great deal of oil. Gucci will soon be opening a store in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s capital. “You don’t have to motivate them to shop,” a Gucci executive wrote to me. “They’re just excited to spend on iconic luxury brands.”
Whatever purposes the stores in Baku serve, shopping does not appear to be among them. Kickbacks and monopoly licenses tend to make import prices here much higher than they are elsewhere. Even the relatively few Azeris who can afford them often use Baku’s boutiques just for window shopping. They prefer to buy cheaper in Dubai or Milan.
“I monitored customers going in and out of these stores, and I never saw more than one or two a day,” says Khadija Ismailova. “They’re not really concerned by how many clients they have. It’s all good for the facade of the country.”
Lately, that facade is showing cracks. Thanks in part to stricter visa laws for visitors, hotel occupancy has fallen from around 70 percent in 2005 to around 45 percent in 2010 as Baku keeps adding beds that no one is sleeping in. “It’s a statement and a nice way for the ministers to demonstrate their wealth,” says Marina Usenko, executive vice president of Jones, Lang, Lasalle Hotels, a consulting firm. “But while it may feel good to invite your friends to the Four Seasons, it makes no economic sense whatsoever. We tried to warn them, but who can you warn in Baku?”
The swanky new apartment complexes springing up everywhere are often untouched on the far side of the front door. Many are empty shells. I met a woman named Tamrika who told me that her ramshackle apartment in Baku had recently acquired a new facade. It was built several feet out from the building’s front wall. In the morning, she opens her window, leans out, and opens her other window.
Much of this Potemkin-village construction was thrown together in the months before the Eurovision Song Contest, which Azerbaijan hosted last May. This was meant to be Baku’s big moment on the world media stage, and Aliyev worked overtime to banish any unsightly reminders of reality. Human-rights groups reported multiple forced evictions as old residences were simply bulldozed out of existence.
As it happens, Eurovision turned out to be something of a public-relations disaster. Western news media persisted in peeking where they weren’t supposed to, despite the authorities’ Oz-like injunctions to pay no attention to the country behind the curtain. Loreen, who won the contest for Sweden, went so far as to meet with opposition activists. My friend Margarita Antidze, a local Reuters correspondent, asked Loreen about it at the post-contest press conference. Antidze was accused of being an Armenian spy with a phony Georgian surname. The next day, allegations that her son was illegitimate were posted on the Internet.
On the other hand, all this stage trickery appears to work best on the very people who know better — the Azeris themselves. Melanie Krebs is doing her postdoctoral research on cosmopolitan attitudes in Azerbaijan for Berlin’s Humboldt University. “When I first came two years ago, I found a lot of people complaining about how rapidly the city was changing,” she says. “Now the same people are saying, ‘Our city has become so beautiful! Our city is on top of the world, even if we don’t know how to survive.’ ”
I visited the empty Dior children’s store on Neftchilar Avenue and asked the manager how things were going. Not so good, he allowed. “Our people don’t have a lot of money.” A child’s dress cost 895 manat — about $1,140. The director of a kindergarten makes around 300 manat a month. “But look here,” he said, beaming. He was pointing at Baku on the list of cities with Baby Dior outlets. “Right next to Barcelona.”
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