Baku Commercial Seaport

a major port of the USSR on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, in the southern part of the Apsheron Peninsula; it is the main steamship base on the Caspian Sea. The port became important in the middle of the 19th century with the revival of trade between Russia and the countries of the Orient. The development of the oil industry of the Baku region in the 1870’s and 1880’s and the construction of a railroad linking the port with Tbilisi (1872), Batumi (1883), and the general Russian network (1900) promoted the rapid growth of the port’s freight turnover. Before the October Revolution, the port had wooden berths without transshipping equipment or well-developed rail connections. The reconstruction of the port facilities took place from 1929 to 1937; it was built with concrete piers having many berths and with railroad tracks, gantry cranes, storage installations, and other facilities. During the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), the port handled a great variety of tasks in the transshipment of military goods and goods of the national economy. In 1962 a ferry service transporting railroad trains to Krasnovodsk by sea was introduced, sharply increasing the capacity to transport dry cargoes. At the present time (1970), a passenger station is being built, as are berths for loading wood; new loading equipment is being introduced; and the berths are being rebuilt. Through the port pass tankers with oil products bound for Astrakhan and the oil bases of the Volga basin; grain, industrial equipment, and other goods transported from the central regions of the country to the republics of Middle Asia; wood (from the Volga basin); and export and import goods of the USSR, European countries, Iran, and other nations, all of which constitute a total annual freight turnover of several million tons.