Nikolai K. Baibakov, the former Soviet oil commissar and head of Gosplan, passed away yesterday at the age of 97. His life story, as described in the below NYTimes article, is certainly a fascinating one:
In an interview with Petroleum Economist in 1998, Mr. Baibakov remembered being summoned to meet with Stalin on a hot day in July 1942. Hitler was advancing to the Caucasus to try to seize the strategically essential oil fields near Baku.
Stalin pointed two fingers at Mr. Baibakov’s head, he recalled. “If you fail to stop the Germans getting our oil, you will be shot,” Stalin said. “And when we have thrown the invader out, if we cannot restart production, we will shoot you again.”
As the deputy to the oil commissar until 1944, and then as commissar himself, Mr. Baibakov accomplished both missions. He also built a pipeline under the ice to bring gasoline to besieged Leningrad, now St. Petersburg.
Mr. Baibakov, who was believed to be the last living commissar who had served under Stalin, went on to revive his country’s oil industry, which remains the engine of the Russian economy. He then oversaw the Soviet Union’s vast central planning apparatus, known by the acronym Gosplan.
In that job, he directed the planners who set and enforce investment, production and other targets for hundreds of ministries and industrial enterprises. During Mr. Baibakov tenure at Gosplan, the Soviet Union expanded its industrial output fivefold and constructed thousands of five-story apartment buildings, many of which are still inhabited. But agriculture faltered.
In 1985, after two decades as chief planner, he was fired by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who was seeking younger aides and new economic directions. “Not all of our managers have broken away from inertia, from old approaches,” Mr. Gorbachev said.
Mr. Baibakov indeed never stopped admiring Stalin, had a picture of Lenin on his office wall and was not convinced that free-market economics trumped central planning. In an interview with Reuters in 2001, he said: “The market and private initiative are the wings in the sail, but the plan and planning are the rudder which guide the ship of the economy to its goal.”
At his death, Mr. Baibakov was president of the board of trustees of the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas and chairman of the All-Russian Association of Drilling and Service Contractors.
Nikolai Konstantinovich Baibakov was born in 1911 in Sabunchi, Azerbaijan. The son of a workman, he graduated from the Azerbaijan Petroleum Institute in 1932 and went to work in the oil fields. He served in the Red Army from 1935 to 1937, and then did various engineering and administrative jobs in the oil industry.
He emerged from World War II with the title people’s commissar of the oil industry. Oil production almost quadrupled over the next decade.
For a time in the 1950s, Lavrenti Beria, head of the secret police, also oversaw important industries, including oil. He granted all Mr. Baibakov’s requests for workers and materials to rebuild the oil industry.
Still, it was a delicate relationship. Once, Mr. Baibakov’s wife, Klaudia, told Mr. Beria that her husband could not come to the phone because he had the flu. Mr. Beria was outraged. He ordered Mr. Baibakov to wear galoshes, as he did, and to fly immediately to a faraway refinery. He did.
Petroleum Engineer asked Mr. Baibakov if Mr. Beria had ever had any of his fellow oil officials shot. “Yes, several,” he replied.
Khrushchev appointed Mr. Baibakov head of Gosplan in 1955, but removed him two years later. The reason may have been Mr. Baibakov’s disagreement with Khrushchev’s push to diminish Stalin’s reputation.
In 2006, the British Broadcasting Corporation interviewed Mr. Baibakov about Khrushchev’s historic speech denouncing Stalin, delivered in 1956 at the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party. He was one of the last surviving witnesses to the speech.
“Maybe there were individual incidents of repression, but what Khrushchev denounced Stalin for, that never happened,” Mr. Baibakov said. “Khrushchev just said those things to try and give himself more authority as a leader.”
After serving in regional and industrial posts for a decade, Mr. Baibakov was asked by Brezhnev to run Gosplan once again, which he did for 20 years.
Brezhnev was hardly a micromanager. The Moscow Times in 2001 reported that when Mr. Baibakov tried to brief him in the late 1970s about deterioration in the economy, Brezhnev said, “Take your manuscript away, so I never have to see it again.”
In another discussion of economics, Brezhnev declared that there were “too many figures” and suggested that the two go hunting instead. Mr. Baibakov shot 14 wild ducks, Brezhnev 21.
Russian announcements made no mention of any survivors of Mr. Baibakov. But the story of how he met his wife, Klaudia, was bandied about on Russian Web sites. She was an aide to the deputy construction commissar and went to his office for a signature. He fell for her, and asked her to lunch. She said no, but accepted an invitation to the movies. At dinner afterward, he said he was too busy for courting and asked her to marry him.
In character as a no-nonsense central planner, he gave her exactly a half-hour to weigh the proposal. They married the next day.
