Oil museums shape discourses around oil through carefully curated narratives of technology, history, and progress. This paper examines four oil museums in Russia and Azerbaijan: Moscow's Pavilion No. 25 "Oil Industry" at the All-Russian Exhibition Center, The Museum of Oil in Perm, and Baku's "Surakhani" ship museum and Nobel Heritage Fund. Through comparative analysis of these sites, I investigate how cultural institutions in oil-rich nations construct meanings around oil's role in state and national development. Specifically, my analysis explores how post-socialist transitions have reshaped collective memories of Soviet-era oil industries while contributing to new national identity formations. The oil museums illuminate how different actors—from oil companies to state institutions to local communities—negotiate their relationship to oil, interpret their petroleum heritage, and envision future energy landscapes. By analyzing how these exhibitions both reinforce and challenge ideologies of petro-modernity across different cultural and political contexts, I show how oil museums serve as critical sites for memory-making and nation-building during global energy transitions.
