Putin

By 1929, with his archrival, Leon Trotsky, in exile and the capitalist world in a shambles, Stalin moved to reshape the Soviet economy into the centralized control-and-command model that persisted until the USSR collapsed under its own weight in 1991. Stalin forced the peasants onto collective farms. Those who displayed reluctance or resistance, and those who were considered well-off and therefore by definition exploiters, were shipped to Siberia and Kazakhstan by cattle car. Millions of Ukrainian peasants who were considered especially recalcitrant—conservative by their peasant nature, nationalistic because of being Ukrainians—were simply starved to death by artificially created famines. All food was confiscated; villages were cut off at the beginning of winter and the corpses were collected come spring. Many Ukrainians would later welcome Hitler’s armies simply because they could not imagine anything worse than Stalin.

Like all the rest of industry, the oil industry came under greater centralized control. The measures of performance were, inevitably, quantitative. For example, when it came to drilling, it was not the amount of oil that was discovered that would prove the standard of measure, because it might be years before that number could be calculated. In the here and now what could be precisely determined was the number and depth of holes drilled, which more often than not led to landscapes pocked like moons.

Nevertheless, oil was found, pumped, refined. In any case, the world market for oil was weak throughout most of the thirties because of the Depression. The USSR was exporting more timber than petroleum.

Germany became one of the USSR’s main customers for oil, especially after the surprise Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, which pledged nonaggression and, secretly, agreed on the dismembering of Poland and the Baltic states. Time would reveal that Stalin had in effect been selling Hitler the gas for his tanks and trucks to invade the Soviet Union. When attacking in June 1941, Hitler knew his blitzkrieg had to succeed because he could never win a war of attrition against the USSR unless, that is, he had the grain of Ukraine and the oil of Baku.

September 25, 1942, was the date set for the capture of Baku’s oil fields. A few days before the attack Hitler’s generals presented him with a cake whose frosting depicted Baku and the Caspian Sea. (There are twenty seconds of black-and-white film of all this.) Greatly amused, Hitler took the “Baku” slice for himself though supposedly also saying: “Unless we get Baku’s oil, the war is lost.”

In July, aware that an attack on Baku was coming, Stalin summoned Nikolai Baibakov, who oversaw Soviet oil production. According to Baibakov’s obituary in The New York Times, “Stalin pointed two fingers at Mr. Baibakov’s head…. ‘If you fail to stop the Germans getting our oil, you will be shot,’ Stalin said. ‘And when we have thrown the invader out, if we cannot restart production, we will shoot you again.’” As the Times notes laconically: “Mr. Baibakov accomplished both missions.” And so Baibakov not only was not executed once or even twice, but outlasted Stalin and all the other bastards great and small, only dying in 2008 at the age of ninety-seven.

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From the end of the war to the end of the USSR, a stretch of only forty-six years, the oil industry was much like the country itself—mighty, cumbersome, fatally flawed. The Baku oil fields, damaged during the war, never regained the production heights achieved before the war. But vast new fields were discovered in the Volga-Ural region and later in West Siberia by teams of intrepid geologists out “feeding the mosquitoes.” Paranoia about contact with foreigners was in part what drove the relentless hunt for new oil fields. Instead of acquiring the knowledge and technology that would have maximized output, but which would have required foreign technicians and specialists on site to demonstrate how the equipment worked, exploration was unceasing. There were always more fields, more oil over the next ridge. Rossiya bolshaya, Russia is big, as the Russians like to say.

The USSR’s main use for oil was for domestic purposes, Moscow always prizing independence from a hostile capitalist world. But Moscow needed that world too because Russia, which before the revolution had been the world’s greatest exporter of grain, had become by the late 1970s the world’s largest importer. In 1963 Khrushchev had spent a third of the country’s gold to buy grain. The collective agriculture forcibly imposed by Stalin was a failure. As the head of a collective farm once said to me: “…collective farming could have worked. It worked in Israel…. But it couldn’t be done by force and decree.” Storage and distribution were also significant problems, up to a third of a year’s crop lost to spillage and spoilage.