Baku oil legend Nikolai Baibakov Dies at 98

As readers of O and G know, many historians think the second half of the 20^th century would have been dramatically different had Hitler’s troops reached Baku. Hitler needed Baku’s oil to fuel his war machine, and when his army failed to penetrate the Caucasus after its 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, it was the beginning of the end for Nazi-era Germany.

Just in case Hitler’s troops were not stopped before they reached Baku, Stalin entrusted one man with making sure that the Nazis could not avail of the city’s legendary oil. This man, who ordered the fields plugged up with cement, was Nikolai Baibakov, who died yesterday in Moscow at the age of 98.

Baibakov – Stalin’s oil commissar and for two decades the director of Soviet economic planning – was born in the Baku oilfield of Sabunchi; his father had worked in the Baku oilfields before him. So he knew intuitively what Stalin was so worked up about. A superlatively colorful actor in the biggest events of recent history, Baibakov recalled with black humor some of his encounters with the murderous Stalin.

In a 1998 interview with The Petroleum Economist, Baibakov said Stalin pointed two fingers at his head and said, “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.”

Those were the tenor of the times. Oil engineers from Baku, accused of crimes such as being the relative of the Czarist-era oil barons, were loaded into railcars with their families like cattle and shipped to Siberia to start new oilfields.

A New York Times obituary quotes Baibakov's reply as to whether his fellow oil officials were shot during those days: “Yes, several.”

Then, as now, Russia’s entire economy was dependent on oil and the revenue from oil exports