Legend of the century. Nikolai Baibakov – 3

By Vestnik Kavkaza

March will mark the fifth anniversary of the death of the legendary Baku resident Nikolai Baibakov, who spearheaded the Soviet oil and gas industry, the champion of active work in the government of the USSR. His work experience extends from a petroleum engineer to deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and head of the State Planning Committee - he worked for 70 years, including 40 years in the highest state bodies.

The main source of oil supply of the USSR remained the Baku oilfields. Due to the interruptions in exporting oil and petroleum products, the storage facilities of Baku became packed to capacity; there was nowhere to put the oil, and a large number of wells were preserved. It was decided to produce oil without reducing the pace, to bring it through pipelines to refineries, to take there the power top and to return back the rest, injecting it into the oil reservoir. Then there was an even more radical solution to the rapid development of oil fields between the Volga and the Urals. The State Committee of Defense asked Baku oil workers to urgently relocate to the outback to develop the oil fields.

Baibakov was appointed representative of the committee on the relocation of a large number of oil workers and technologies from the Caucasian regions to the east. In just three months, almost nine thousand Baku oil workers moved to the eastern regions. Almost all the oil industry of Azerbaijan was moved. A "Second Baku" was gradually gaining strength, and Baibakov moved to the post of Commissar of the Oil Industry. 

He became commissar in 1944 and immediately suggested to Stalin to start the production of drilling rigs and other oilfield equipment for oil field development at the defense plants, starting the conversion of the companies. Then the "leader of the peoples" asked Baibakov almost rhetorically: "What features should a Soviet Commissar have?" "Knowing his industry, diligence, honesty, integrity, the ability to rely on the team ..." - Baibakov listed. But Stalin interrupted him: "Soviet Commissar needs above all nerves of steel plus optimism!"

In August 1955, Nikita Khrushchev, who after the death of Stalin became the first secretary of the Central Committee, proposed Baibakov to lead the State Planning Commission. He began to refuse, saying that he was not an economist and would fail in the planning of the economy of a huge country. Khrushchev's argument was as follows: "Am I an economist? Do I understand planning? But I manage the country's entire economy. "

One of the main achievements of Baibakov as head of Gosplan is the master plan of reconstruction of railway transport of the USSR of moving from steam traction to electric and diesel traction. The implementation of such a plan would allow a manifold increase in the efficiency of rail transportation.

But the relations between Khrushchev and Baibakov were not so smooth. Khrushchev decided to replace ministries with economic councils, Baibakov adamantly opposed the elimination of key ministries - of energy, defense, transportation, raw materials and machinery, "If we eliminate the ministry, we will lose the reins of government in the economy. There will be no management of branches, and we will destroy our economy," Baibakov warned Khrushchev. He did not want to listen to this and soon transferred him from the post of head of the Soviet State Planning Committee to the post of chairman of the Russian State Planning Commission, and then lowered him to the head of the Krasnodar Economic Council.

In a couple of years Baibakov's forecast came true - the economic councils were not justified, and they began to be enlarged. Six northern economic councils were merged into one, and tghe disgraced Baibakov was asked to manage them. But he did not work in this position for a long time - soon he received a call to Moscow and new positions: Chairman of the State Committee for Chemistry at the Council of Ministers, and the head of the State Committee on the oil industry in the USSR State Planning Committee.

In 1965, Khrushchev's successor as first secretary of the Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev called Baibakov and said: Go back to the State Planning Commission. Baibakov returned and served as head of the State Planning Committee of the USSR for 20 years. "Brezhnev in the early years in the post of secretary-general was very active, and his work was effective, but due to his illness his activity was significantly decreased. And then the national economy entered the worst black and tragic time. Our economists offered nothing but the general arguments about the need for realignment of economic management. New people came, and many of them did not have the proper experience. This appears to be a disaster for us," Baibakov said.

In 1985 he retired, but he worked for three years as the State Counsellor at the Presidium of the Council of Ministers, and then led the oil and gas section of the Scientific Council of the Institute of Oil and Gas of the RAS. He was always a conservative supporter of the control system of the Soviet type. "We should be able to combine market mechanisms with planning. So I very much appreciate the experience of China, which continues to work according to our Soviet central planning system of economic management," Baibakov said. "Oil and gas feed the country, and the non-primary sector is not developing. And indeed the oil and gas industry is also under threat. All our vaunted economic growth exists only due to wasting the stocks created in Soviet times".