Nikolai Baibakov RIP

Kyt · Apr 2, 2008

Nikolai Baibakov - Telegraph

Nikolai Baibakov, who died on March 31 aged 97, headed the Soviet oil ministry under Josef Stalin, served in his cabinet and was, from the 1960s, chief economic planner of the Soviet Union until Mikhail Gorbachev arrived on the scene in 1985 and revealed that the Soviet economy was on the brink of collapse.

In Russia Baibakov was celebrated for his role in saving the Soviet Union's precious oil fields from Adolf Hitler when, at the end of July 1942, German forces threatened to invade the Caucasus.

As vice-commissar of the Soviet oil industry, Baibakov was summoned before the State Defence Committee, presided over by Stalin, who asked him whether there was any way to stop the Germans getting oil from the wells while keeping the Soviet Army supplied right up to the last minute if necessary.

There was, Baibakov told him, only one way: dismantle the most valuable equipment in time and move it to the east, continue to pump oil, and distribute fuel to the front until the last minute; then destroy the wells and the installations.

Stalin approved his proposal and instructed him to go to the Caucasus with a team of engineers and explosives technicians, adding: "If you fail to stop the Germans getting our oil, you will be shot, and when we have thrown the invader out, if we cannot restart production we will shoot you again."

Baibakov carried out the mission, destroying oil installations in front of the German advance. When Stalin gave him the post of commissar of the oil industry two years later, he told Baibakov that he must have nerves of steel. By 1946 Soviet oil production was back to pre-war levels.

Baibakov went on to play a crucial role as the architect of Soviet oil and gas development, both west and east of the Urals in Siberia, as oil commissar and, later, as the longest-serving chairman of Gosplan, the all-powerful Soviet central planning organisation.

But not all parts of the Soviet economy were as amenable to central planning as oil production. Baibakov spent more than 20 years deciding whether the massive Soviet economy should produce widgets, wheelbarrows or nuclear missiles.

He became a familiar face at party congresses announcing the brilliant successes of the latest five-year plan and boasting about how many more washing machines, radios and refrigerators the average Soviet family possessed.

But his brave claims could never mask the chronic shortages that continued to persist in crucial areas of the economy, from steel, coal, fertilisers, cement, paper and electricity down to basic consumer goods such as table crockery and knives and forks.

Yet Baibakov remained an unrepentant believer in Stalinist central planning, and to the end of his life was able to reel off reams of statistics of industrial production "proving" that economists' suggestions that the economy had stagnated in the 1970s and 1980s were wide of the mark.

Nikolai Konstantinovich Baibakov was born at Sabunchi, in what was then the Russian Empire (now Azerbaijan), on March 6 1911. The son of an oil engineer, he finished school in 1928 and entered the Azerbaijan Oil and Chemistry Institute, graduating as a mining engineer. In 1935 he was drafted into the armed forces.

After completing his military service, he was appointed head of the Eastern Oil Drilling Extraction Board, which was charged with developing oil production in Siberia.

Baibakov joined the Communist Party in 1939 and served as a member of the party's central committee from 1952 to 1961 and later from 1966 to 1989. He served as commissar for the oil industry until 1955, when Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, appointed him head of Gosplan.

He was present at the secret final session of the 20th party congress on February 25 1956, when Khrushchev denounced his predecessor as a tyrant who had had hundreds of thousands of citizens executed or sent to prison camps.

The speech was so shocking that members of the audience fainted - and even 50 years later Baibakov refused to describe what he had heard. "Maybe there were individual incidents of repression," he conceded, "but what Khrushchev denounced Stalin for, that never happened… Khrushchev just said those things to try and give himself more authority as a leader."

The attack on his hero led to an estrangement between Baibakov and Khrushchev, and in 1957 he became a prominent victim of Kruschchev's attempts to decentralise the economy, being dismissed from Gosplan. For the next few years he served as chairman of one of the new regional economic councils in the Krasnodar region and, from 1963, in the North Caucasus.

Khrushchev's successor, Leonid Brezhnev, was a man much more to Baibakov's taste: "All participants in the October Plenary meeting of 1964 were able to take a deep breath when Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev finally took over as party head," Baibakov recalled.

"Everyone was well aware how good-natured and friendly Leonid Ilyich was. His handsome face with its thick eyebrows seemed calm and dignified. As he sat at the presidium table his features seemed deep in thought and promised all participants of the Plenary meeting a tranquil and well-provided-for life."

In 1965, after signing documents consigning Khrushchev's regional councils to the dustbin, Baibakov resumed his old post at Gosplan and became deputy chairman of the USSR's council of ministers.

Even though he remained a staunch believer in central planning, Baibakov could not avoid economic realities entirely, and in the late 1970s he produced a report in which he attempted to convince Brezhnev and other members of the Politburo of the real state of the economy.

Brezhnev accused Baibakov of exaggerating: "Take your manuscript away so that I never have to see it again," Brezhnev is reported to have said.

When Baibakov tried to raise the issue again, Brezhnev ticked him off for bothering him with "too many figures" and suggested that they go hunting instead. History records that Baibakov shot 14 wild duck, Brezhnev 21.

Gosplan lived through a short period of optimism from the time Yuri Andropov came to power in November 1982 until his death in February 1984, and Baibakov threw his support behind Andropov's efforts to resurrect the economy by means of "stricter discipline".

Even after Andropov's death, the coming financial meltdown was not immediately visible to Gosplan. Baibakov and his colleagues remained confident that the system could be kept going until 2000, when, they predicted, Soviet levels of labour productivity would be on a par with the United States.

Gosplan's forecasts, however, did not take into account the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev, who took the reins at the end of 1985. In October that year the 74-year-old Baibakov was compelled to resign and was appointed state counsellor of the USSR Council of Ministers.

After retiring in 1988 Baibakov, who had been appointed a Hero of Socialist Labour after the war, returned to the oil industry, as chairman of the All-Russian Association of Drilling and Service Contractors and president of the board of trustees of the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas.

He was scathing about the market reforms introduced under Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, telling an interviewer in 2001 that "the market and private initiative are the wind in the sail, but the plan and planning are the rudder which guide the ship of the economy to its goal".

After the election of Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, he predicted that "the situation will change for the better, even if slowly, and the role of the state in the economy will grow".

The interviewer noted the huge portrait of Lenin behind his desk and the Kalashnikov gun tie-pin fastening his tie, observing that Baibakov "still exuded the air of authority that was his trademark during his public life".

Baibakov was married, but it is not known whether he had any children.
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Adrian Roberts · Apr 2, 2008

Probably the last of Stalin's apparatchiks. Should we mourn his passing? If he really saved the oil supplies in WW2 he was probably more efficient than many of them.

spidge · Apr 2, 2008

I liked the fait accompli!

If you fail to stop the Germans getting our oil, you will be shot, and when we have thrown the invader out, if we cannot restart production we will shoot you again."
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