Vestnik Kavkaza’s guest is the director of the Institute of Petrochemical Synthesis at the Russian Academy of Sciences, a member of academia, Salambek Naibovich Khajiyev.
- Salamber Naibovich, you were the first and only Chechen to serve as a Minister of the Soviet Union. In 1991 you were appointed head of the Department of the Chemical and Petrochemical Industry of the USSR. Is it true that at the time our oil was also the foundation of the country's budget and that the country lived off oil revenues?
- Yes, "lived off" is not very correct. The share of revenues from oil and refined petroleum products, oil-based chemical products, has always been quite high in the budget of our country - today and in Soviet times. But a "high" share does not mean 100%. It is at 50-60%, it constitutes 40 % now. Therefore, we shouldn't say "lives off it", it is just that it significantly contributes to the budget of the country. It was like that in Soviet times as well.
- It wasn't taking resources from future generations, as some politicians claimed?
- No, there is nothing wrong in it. The fact is that it isn't right to say "wasting resources". Of course, all natural resources are being used. But we are even finding new oil deposits. Therefore, if I remember... When I started working in oil production in [19]62, that is, already 53 years ago, people were already saying that there would be no oil in 20 years. But now, 20 years later, we are discovering more and more new fields. Another thing is that it is becoming... If there used to be more high-gravity oil, which was easy to process, now there is mostly low-gravity oil, which is harder to process, but nevertheless it is oil and we use it. Gas and coal are other resources. And we already know how to do everything we make from oil from gas and coal, but this is a pricing issue. We can do it cheaply and expensively. Therefore, we must talk seriously about hydrocarbon raw materials such as oil, gas, coal and biomass. Humanity has enough hydrocarbons for the next couple of thousand years.
- How did you get the offer to head the Federal Ministry?
- I cannot explain why I was appointed minister, but I can tell you how I got the offer. At the time I was research director at the Grozneftehim association. It was a scholarly, industrial association, and the Research Institute of Grozny, the design institute "Grozneftehim", experiences plants, refineries in Tuapse, the Opytnyi Zvod and a special design bureau in Angarsk and in Ufa. That is, it was a fairly large institution, and our institute developed a general plan for the development of the refining and petrochemical industry in our country. The Grozny Institute is one of the oldest institutions. And so ,as the director general, I, of course, oversaw the development of the petrochemical, refining industry in the country. This,I think, influenced the decision process. This decision was taken by the Party's Central Committee. Secondly, at the time I was a USSR deputy, I was a rather well-known USSR deputy.
- Of the Congress of People's Deputies?
- Yes, of the Congress of People's Deputies. At the same time, I was a member of the Supreme Council. Not all the deputies were members of the Supreme Council, but I was a member of the Supreme Council and of the Budget Committee, which was involved in the country's budget. And when the then-minister, the director general of Nizhnekamsk, Nikolai Vasilyevich Lemayev retired, he recommended me. At first I refused, to tell you the truth.
- Why did you refuse the offer? Did something bother you?
- No, no, nothing bothered me, I simply considered myself to be more of a scholar than an administrator. The director general was an administrative position, but nevertheless I worked in the research industry and science was paramount. I refused, because I wanted to go home to Grozny and work there and I was spending two to three days in Moscow, it was difficult. But then one issue was raised: there was a recommendation, I was told that Gorbachev had proposed my candidacy. An issue was raised: you have always criticized us (and I indeed criticized the government) and now, when you have been offered a job, you refuse to take it - tell it to the Supreme Council. Go work, since you've criticized us. And for someone from the Caucasus, as you know, this was a challenge. I told Pavlov: "Okay, I'll take the offer, but with one condition. I would like to turn the ministry into a corporation." And at the time Chernomyrdin was beginning to turn Gazprom into a corporation. And we began our preparations, we began turning the petrochemical industry into a corporation. But unfortunately, the Emergency Committee and other things happened and we did not have the time to turn it into a corporation. Otherwise, we would have had a unified corporation in the country. That's how I happened to be a minister: I was offered the job; at first I didn't want it, but then I agreed. But there is some interesting work to be done there, it is large-scale work.
- Did you think that it was appropriate to repurpose the ministry into a corporation?
- It wasn't a repurposing, it was reorganization. It was a different form of organization. Gazprom had time to do it, they started a little earlier, and, you see, Gazprom is still alive, while our chemistry has crumbled. We are barely centralizing things now. We are only starting to centralize. It all used to be in our ministry - more than 800 enterprises, of more than 800 large companies, I do not even remember how many small companies there were.
- It was a gigantic complex.
- Yes. I thought in a different way. We were trying to create a lot of companies because there needs to be many companies for a market, for competition to exist, but this was a mistake, because we were not going to compete with each other, this wasn't how it worked. We were to open the borders and to compete with the major Western companies, while small companies were not able to compete with Western firms. Therefore, it was necessary to create a large company that could compete with the whole world. And this is the way it all happened. This is how our chemical industry was killed, because they have powerful resources, cheap loans, a big market. They killed our chemical industry, we are only starting to restore it now.
- Now we've learned about one more negative outcome of the Emergency Committee. So, you were not allowed to repurpose, reorganize the ministry into a corporation. Otherwise, we would not have lost...
- Well, there was a lot they didn't allow the country to do. And, most importantly, even though everyone says that Gorbachev collapsed the country, in fact, it was ruined by the Emergency Committee, if truth be told, for the simple reason that the agreement on a union state was already ready at the time. And if it were not for the Emergency Committee, an agreement on a union state would have taken place, since there was a goal to create something similar to the EU from the Soviet Union, and it could have been a viable organism...
- There could have been a chance.
- Yes, there could have been a chance, but Yeltsin benefited from the Emergency Committee. The [Soviet] Union could only be destroyed by the Slavs. And at the time, if you remember, three Slavs, including Yeltsin, Kravchuk and Shushkevich, destroyed the Union. They are to blame for it. No one except for the Slavs could destroy the Soviet Union, but they wanted to do it and they succeeded.
- Yes, but unfortunately, the Emergency Committee contributed to this, as you say.
- The Emergency Committee gave the three of them a chance to meet and tell everyone that we were in danger, they persuaded the people that something needed to be done. If there wasn't an Emergency Committee, they would not have gotten this chance and perhaps we'd have a different life now. And if these three Slavs had not done what they did, we would have a different life now.
- Salambek Naibovich, talking about problems in Russia today you said in one of the interviews that Russia should not abandon the idea of hydrocarbon exports, the processing of oil and gas in the country simply needs to increase. I have a simple man's question: has the raw materials processing industry been destroyed in our country? I am told that many thing are in ruins today, and therefore there is the very difficult problem of import substitution and that it is present in the petrochemical industry.
- I think that people thinking like that are not very competent. The refining industry is not in collapse, in fact it has been restored and it is bigger than it used to be in the Soviet Union. There are more plants, the production volume is larger and the quality is much higher. On the other hand, it does not meet today's requirements, since almost 24 years have passed since the Soviet Union.
- We are lagging behind in terms of technology, right?
- We are investing less than we could have, perhaps, but in comparison with the Soviet Union, production has increased. It is lagging behind in comparison with the West, but it has gone up in comparison with the Soviet Union. Our oil production in terms of its volume, without taking the depth into consideration is much greater than our country needs. Our country can consume 150 million tons of oil products, but we produce approximately 280. We sell almost 130 million tons of oil products abroad.
- We simply have to sell it.
- Yes, well, these are some resources, some money. What does it mean, to sell oil abroad? This means that we pay our workers with their money, we maintain structural objects on their money. Everybody wants to get some money for their workers from abroad, it is normal. It is good that we are selling 130 million. We export a lot of petrochemichals as well. If you take chemistry and petrochemistry without the refining industry (we seem to have three industries - oil refining, petrochemicals and chemistry), today we sell petrochemicals and chemical products abroad worth almost $50 billion. However, we buy almost the same amount of products, because unfortunately the industry has collapsed, but nevertheless we sell 50-billion worth.
In terms of import substitution, we have almost no problems in the refining industry, they are not able to pose big problems for us, we are in a position to quickly produce everything we buy there. There are no big problems in the petrochemical industry either. There are more problems in the low-tonnage production of chemical products, but the country is capable of dealing with it in 2-4 years, our country is very technically advanced. In principle, there are no things we can't deal with in this world. Not yet. Therefore, there will be problems in the field of chemistry, but I think we can solve them in 3-4 years.
-Are there any prerequisites to solving them? Is there, say, the political will to solve them? Can you see it?
- Yes, of course. There are import substitution programs in all spheres, there are plans about the types of products and their amounts needed to be bought and about where to buy them. On the other hand, if prices for oil did not decrease, we could have had the possibility to finance it all, and now we will face some financing difficulties due to import substitution. Well, our country loves to create problems and then solve them, we will solve these problems too.
To be continued
