After the discovery of oil fields, Baku became a special place, where various economic and political interests of international coalitions, industrial clans and leaders were concentrated and clashed. VK begins publishing chapters from the book by Ismail Agakishiev "History of the Baku Oil Industry and the Second Oil Boom (second half of the 19th century - beginning of the 20thcentury.)". The book presents a historical analysis of the emergence and current state of the Azerbaijani oil industry.
To a large extent due to these measures the industry started intensive development. At the XXX congress of the Azerbaijani Communist party in 1981, Aliyev had reasons to claim that “we have completely overcome the former decline of the economy and significantly changed the scale and structure of industrial production.” As a result, the situation in the oil-processing and oil-chemical industry improved dramatically. As Aliyev put it in one of his later speeches, “we got our oil plants almost from tsarist times and they hardly complied with any modern requirements. When I studied this question, it turned out that the USSR has new equipment and machines, but the central ministry builds them in other regions. Imagine: Azerbaijan has been extracting oil for centuries, but the new plants with innovative technologies are built elsewhere… We put the question sharply to the Ministry and the Council of Ministers and achieved the construction of two pig oil-processing plants in Azerbaijan… We completely changed the equipment of the XXII Party Congress factory and built a new plant with the help of German specialists. New equipment to produce high-quality petroleum was bought in France and a complex for catalytic reforming was built…"
In 1976 a new installation for oil processing was built on the Novobakinsy oil plant. Afterwards, the same one, later named ELOU AVT 6, was assembled at another oil plant in Baku. It could process six million tons of oil per year. As a result, Baku started to produce the best-quality petroleum. Between 1970 and 1980 investment in the oil industry of the republic reached 400 million rubles. This was possible because of the insistence of the republic's leadership.
In the 1970s and 1980s all the oil plants were reconstructed; 480 million rubles was allocated for this purpose. Several new enterprises were organized on the basis of the Schmidt factory, which became the center of an oil machine-building factory. The Sarukhansky plant started producing bore-hole pumps. The plant “Baku Worker” introduced the production of beam pumping units. The Baku machine-building factory began to make drill pipe joints and drilling bits. In the early 1980s, up to 70% of all the equipment used by the oil industry of the USSR was produced in Baku.
Thus, the branch structure of the Azerbaijani industry underwent substantial alterations. The functions of the Azerbaijani plants were significantly widened. They were now supplying oil and chemical factories across the entire country. The high-technology branches – machine-building, chemistry and oil-chemistry - increased from 14% to 21%. In connection to this, the share of machines in the structure of the overall industrial production of Azerbaijan grew from 5.1% in 1960 to 13.5% in 1980. For the chemical and oil-chemical industry this index stood at 2.9% and 7.5% respectively. The role of Azerbaijani machine-building plants in supplying the oil industry of the country grew dramatically. The main Azerbaijani industrial plants became the leading suppliers of equipment for the oil industry of the entire country. These chemical plants and oil-chemical plants processed most of the oil extracted in the country.
The positive changes in the structure of the oil complex of Azerbaijan allowed for improvement in the social sphere in the republic, although not all the plans could be fully implemented. In the mid-1970s the Azerbaijani Communist Party proposed to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party a new program for the future industrial development of the republic. The new program resulted in the decree on July 27, 1976, that presupposed the construction of 14 new modern industrial plants, including several in the oil sector.
The crisis of the social and economic development of the USSR, apparent already in the early 1980s, and the shortcomings of perestroika had a negative impact on the oil industry of Azerbaijan. The situation was aggravated by the political turbulence of the late 1980s. The oil industry entered a new state.
