Nikolai Baibakov, 97; was oil minister under Stalin

Nikolai Baibakov (bottom), addressing the Soviet polituro in Moscow. (ap/file 1968)

MOSCOW - Nikolai Baibakov, who served as Josef Stalin's oil commissar and later guided the Soviet Union's planned economy for two decades, died of pneumonia Monday in Moscow. At 97, he was believed to have been the last living commissar to serve under Stalin.

Mr. Baibakov was also thought to have been one of the last surviving witnesses of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's historic "secret speech" denouncing Stalin at the 1956 Soviet Communist Party congress.

Mr. Baibakov served as USSR's deputy oil commissar during World War II. In 1944, he was named Stalin's oil commissioner and was fired in 1985 by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose economic and social reforms preceded the Soviet collapse.

In 1942, Mr. Baibakov recalled in a 1998 interview, Stalin summoned him and told him he would be shot if the advancing Nazi army seized oil wells in Azerbaijan. Stalin warned him that he would also be shot if, after the war, the wells could not be returned to production, he said in the interview with Petroleum Economist magazine.

"If you leave at least a ton of oil to Germans, we will shoot you," he quoted Stalin as saying. "But if the Germans don't get there and we will be unable to restart the production, we will shoot you, too."

Mr. Baibakov fulfilled both orders, surviving to launch the Soviet Union's postwar development of oil and gas deposits in Siberia. He pushed for massive investment in the industry that would become the backbone of the Soviet Union's planned economy and the foundation for post-Soviet Russia's booming economy.

In 1955, Mr. Baibakov was appointed head of Gosplan, the huge Soviet central planning agency that set production quotas and investment levels for industry and agriculture. In that job, he was expected to ensure that what was called "the worker's paradise" delivered on its economic promises.

As top planner, he helped boost industrial production but failed to revive farm production, forcing the Kremlin to buy wheat from the United States and Canada and weakening the Soviet Union's positions in the Cold War.

"The Soviet economy that was formed in the 1960s, 1970s, and, partly, the 1980s, was Baibakov's creation," Russia's former economic minister Andrey Nechayev told Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily.

In 1968, Mr. Baibakov survived an assassination attempt in Tokyo after a Japanese nationalist attacked him with a wooden sword. The attack was inspired by claims by both countries to sovereignty over four of the Kuril islands, which the Soviets seized in the closing days of World War II. The issue of control of those islands still divides Japan and Russia.

In Mr. Baibakov's role as chief architect of Russia's economy at Gosplan, he and his staff tried to replace the forces of the free market by allocating investment and setting production quotas to anticipate demand. He also struggled to control Soviet military spending as Moscow engaged in an arms race with Washington.

Gorbachev fired Mr. Baibakov in 1985, at the dawn of perestroika, after Mr. Baibakov resisted efforts to reform the economy.

Mr. Baibakov was born in 1911 into an oil driller's family in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan and one of the birthplaces of the world oil industry. He served in the Red Army in the Far East.

Until his death Mr. Baibakov remained an active figure in the oil and gas industry and continued to defend the concept of a planned economy. "He was the knight of the utopian planned economy," Ruslan Greenberg, director of the Russian economy institute, told the Izvestia daily.