The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas

ONE
THE PIONEERS
As Theodor Weisser approached the Soviet border, he felt a shudder of fear.
Travelling from Western Europe to the Soviet Union in 1954 would have
been a daunting journey for anyone, but for Weisser it required particular
courage. As a soldier in the German army, he had been captured by Soviet
forces in the Second World War and made a prisoner on the Eastern Front.
Now in his forties, but with the memories of his time in a Soviet prison
camp still fresh, this trip would be his first to Russia as a free man. At the
last minute, fearing that someone he’d encountered during the war might
recognise him, he bought a red cap and pulled it down over his eyes. 
Weisser was in ground-breaking territory. He was travelling to the capital
of Communism at a time when the Cold War dominated public discourse in
the West. Since a Soviet-backed coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Western
Europe had become increasingly alarmed about the threat of an assertive
Soviet Union on its doorstep. And America was gripped by the Red Scare
whipped up by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s public denunciations of
suspected Communists.
But Weisser was not the kind of man to be easily deterred. He had set off
from Hamburg determined to buy some oil, and he wasn’t going to leave
without a deal. He made his way through Moscow’s wide, empty highways
to one of the few hotels where foreigners were permitted to stay, and waited
for the Soviet bureaucracy to take notice of him.
He didn’t have to wait for long. Soon, he had succeeded in securing a
dinner appointment with Evgeny Gurov: the head of Soyuznefteexport, the
government agency that controlled the Soviet Union’s oil trade. Gurov was
an ideologue who recognised earlier than many others the potential for oil
to be used as a strategic weapon. Weisser, on the other hand, was not
motivated by ideology, but by profit. His company, Mabanaft, was a
distributor of fuel across West Germany. And it was losing money. Weisser
needed to find new sources of oil to sell to his clients, and that meant going
where few others would dare.
No record remains of where the two men dined or what they ate, but it
must have been a peculiar affair: one of the Soviet Union’s top trade
officials sitting at a table with a former prisoner of war, toasting their new
acquaintance under the watchful eyes of the KGB.
There was a period of negotiation, but Weisser’s perseverance would
ultimately be rewarded: Soyuznefteexport sold him one cargo of diesel for
resale in West Germany. The trader’s pioneering spirit would prove costly,
however, at least initially. On his return to Germany, his willingness to deal
with the Cold War adversary meant he was shunned by much of the oil
industry. The shipping companies he had been using to transport his fuel
around the country refused to do business with him, on the grounds that
their other customers didn’t want to charter ships that had previously held
oil from the Soviet Union. 
But Weisser, a consummate networker with a broad, open face and a
winning smile, knew he had secured the only thing that mattered from his
trip to Moscow: a contact behind the Iron Curtain. His first deal marked the
beginning of a relationship that would continue for years, underpinning the
profits of his trading business. In 1956, Gurov visited Weisser in return,
and, in Munich, he signed a one-year contract to sell diesel to Mabanaft.
Soon, the German trader was also buying crude oil from the Soviets.
The early deals with the Soviet Union were a personal triumph for
Weisser, a testament to his courage, tenacity and charm. But they were also
a sign of how the world was changing, and the increasingly critical role that
commodity traders like Weisser would play in it.
After decades of economic depression, stagnation and war, the world was
entering an era of stability and economic prosperity. The horrors of war had
given way to a peace policed by the US’s growing military might – the Pax
Americana. Where living conditions in the mid-1940s had been marked by
price controls and rationing, by the 1960s a growing number of households
in the US, Europe and Japan could afford televisions, refrigerators and cars.

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources by Javier Blas