“The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel
By Douglas Brunt
Atria, 368 pages, $32
There is symmetry to the tale of the Nobel family in Russia. It starts with Immanuel Nobel's arrival in St. Petersburg in 1838 after narrowly avoiding debtors' prison in his native Sweden. It ends 80 years later when his grandson Emanuel, the head of the family business, flees the new Bolshevik regime. He was lucky to escape.
The Soviets wrote the Nobels out of Russian history, bar the occasional sneer. The family's extraordinary accomplishments were compelling evidence that the Bolshevik takeover was a break from something far more promising than the rotten autocracy of Soviet legend. In "The Lost Empire of Emanuel Nobel," Douglas Brunt aims to restore the Nobels "to their rightful place in world history."
In his enthralling and accessible book, Mr. Brunt gives the family its due and points to a different Russia that was denied the chance to emerge.
"For a time," he writes, "Russia's industrialists and the Romanovs seemed to be leading the empire along a path of gradual reform to a constitutional monarchy."
With the exception of the liberalizing Alexander II, who reigned from 1855 to 1881, that gives the Romanovs too much credit, but the path was plausible enough.
Immanuel was a polymath, an intermittently successful entrepreneur and an inventor. (Mr. Brunt calls him an "Edison-type tinkerer.") He owed his financial recovery in Russia to a knack for making explosives. Soon after landing in St. Petersburg he won a contract to supply mines to the Russian navy. These mines formed the core of a thriving engineering business. All went well until the conclusion of the Crimean War in 1856. The Russian state's peace dividend included reneging on its contracts with Immanuel's firm and he returned to Sweden a few years later.
His second son, Ludvig, stayed behind and started a manufacturing business that flourished as a machine builder and supplier of weapons to the Russian military. In 1873 Ludvig sent his elder brother, Robert, to the Caucasus to buy walnut trees for wooden rifle stocks. On arriving in Baku, in today's Azerbaijan, Robert found a land saturated in oil but lacking the capital and the technology to take advantage of it.
Alexander II believed in allowing capitalism to do more to grow Russia's economy. A few weeks before Robert arrived in Baku, Mr. Brunt relates, the czar had "set more than 3,000 acres of prime oil lands for auction to private speculators." Robert quickly used the walnut-tree money to buy as much land as he could. He and Ludvig set up an oil company called Branobel ("Brothers Nobel"). Among their backers was a third Nobel brother, Alfred, already well on his way to immense wealth after patenting dynamite in 1867. Before his death three decades later he arranged to leave most of his fortune to establish the annual prizes that now bear the family's name.
Ludvig and Robert worked in a strikingly modern way. They embraced continuous improvement and innovation, taking advantage of their complementary skills. Ludvig, an engineer, was the better businessman, but Robert, who had a background in chemistry, raised the quality of Branobel's refined product to a level comparable with that of Standard Oil. The Nobels were enlightened employers and (as the Soviets understood) embarrassing proof that Russia didn't need commissars to industrialize.
By 1880 Robert was no longer active in the business. Ludvig died in 1888 and Emanuel, his oldest son, took over. Not yet 30, Emanuel had worked for years with his father and was already responsible for the financial oversight of the family's oil and manufacturing ventures. His new role was made trickier by mounting international competition. Like his forebears he welcomed new ideas. Emanuel grasped the potential of the diesel engine and secured its patent rights in Russia in 1898.
Mr. Brunt, whose previous book was a biography of Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the eponymous engine, reckons that by 1910 Russia was second only to Germany as the most "dieselized" country on the planet. In 1914 Emanuel controlled half the Russian oil industry. His diesel engines powered factories, mills, merchant ships, tankers, submarines and warships. Emanuel, Mr. Brunt writes, headed "the greatest industrial empire in Russia, perhaps in all Europe." The business was a source of pride to the Romanovs as "a domestic firm that could not only compete on the world stage but could best the most famous corporations from Europe and America."
In recounting the story of the Nobels, Mr. Brunt also narrates Russia's descent toward revolution and civil war. Russia's reformist path, the author contends, ended due to "a confluence of bizarre events and incredible twists." There was the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, but Mr. Brunt also highlights the early death of Alexander III in 1894, the "fecklessness" of his successor, Nicholas II, "a hemophiliac czarevich, a bizarre mystic, a world war" and revolution. In 1887 Ludvig wrote of his optimism about the family's business "as long as no revolution sweeps away all wealth and all private ownership in one go." In the end it did.
A skillful storyteller, Mr. Brunt seems to like the drama of a countdown, and so he occasionally pauses to note rising proletarian discontent here, a bank robbery by Joseph Stalin there, a czar adrift, the monarchy unraveling. He clearly appreciates the value of a fearsome antagonist, though he somewhat overstates the threat Stalin personally posed to Emanuel after the revolution.
In June 1918 the Bolsheviks nationalized the oil industry. "Generations of Nobel vision, investment, and execution," Mr. Brunt writes, "became a state monopoly overnight." As a prominent class enemy Emanuel was certainly in danger, as were his half-brothers Gosta and Emil, who worked for the business and were briefly detained by the Cheka. After their release they escaped Russia, joining Emanuel in Sweden in December. There, they were free to remember. Those in the land they left behind would be forced to forget.
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Mr. Stuttaford is the editor of National Review's Capital Matters.” [1]
1. Imperial Industry. Stuttaford, Andrew. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 10 Aug 2026: A15.
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