Hammer’s involvements in this venture during the nineteen twenties were to result in the setting up of his own Occidental Oil and Gas Company, the lasting legacy of which is the great pipeline that runs westwards across the Ukraine into Europe; which still provides us with one of our main supplies of natural gas. Although Hammer’s links to the old Soviet power elite are a well known matter of record, the connection between what is currently going on in Kazakhstan now and what previously went on right the way across the Soviet Union under Stalin have quite probably escaped the notice of all but a few.

Fewer still are aware of the involvement of a number of key American bankers and industrialists, including John D. Rockefeller, whose vast multinational oil empire was to include the original Exxon and Mobil companies, in the financing of the Russian Revolution. A fact pointed out by Anthony Sutton in his little known and highly specialized work on ‘Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution’ originally published in 1974 and since re-issued in HTML format back in 2001.

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s masterly biography of the ‘Young Stalin’ hints at how what may have started off as a youthful merchant adventurist tendency towards blackmail and extortion, in the Georgian oil fields of the old Czarist Empire, may have escalated into the cutting of deals with Western Capitalist oligarchs, of whom Hammer and Paul Mellon are perhaps the best known. to finance the megalomaniacal court of the ‘Red Tsar’. Perhaps this explains why, in spite of the fall of the Red Empire, the Kazakh People are still being oppressed!?