Nikolai Baibakov, who died Monday in Moscow at 98, oversaw the Soviet oil industry during World War II. Later, as head of Gosplan, the Soviet economic planning commission from 1965–85, he was in charge of producing the five-year plans that set the agenda for the nation’s economic output.

The news agency ITAR-Tass called him “the last of Stalin’s narkoms,” as the nation’s commissars were called.

In 1942, as Hitler turned south to lunge for the USSR’s oil fields in the Caucuses, Stalin summoned Baibakov — then a deputy oil commissar — and asked him to prevent wells from falling into the hands of the Nazi war machine.

Recalling the meeting in a 1998 interview with the industry publication Petroleum Economist, Baibakov said that the dictator pointed two fingers at Baibakov’s temple 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.”

Baibakov succeeded in blocking wells in Maikop, Grozny, Krasnodar, and Baku. The Germans retrieved little oil from the fields, which had to be redrilled after the war. During the siege of Leningrad, he led the construction of a 28-km pipeline under the ice of Lake Ladoga to deliver gasoline. He was named oil narkom in 1944. At the end of the war, Baibakov led the reconstruction of the Soviet oil industry, which regained pre-war production levels in 1946. In ensuing years, the country became a major producer of natural gas, also his agency’s responsibility.

In 1965, Baibakov became chairman of the state planning commission, a 3,700-strong bureaucracy that set command economy output goals for agriculture and all kinds of industry. Soviet industrial output rose in the following years, but agricultural production was lackluster and it consistently failed to reach its goal of flooding the market with consumer goods. The nation was forced to import millions of tons of wheat from America in the 1970s. Always a defender of central planning, Baibakov insisted that Soviet production was rising faster than that of its rivals in the West until he was finally removed from his post in 1985 by Mikhail Gorbachev in the early phases of perestroika.

Nikolai Konstantinovich Baibakov was born in 1911 in Baku, an area so thoroughly drenched in petroleum that it was the center of pilgrimage for fire worshipers centuries before anybody figured out industrial uses for the oozing liquid. His father worked as an oil engineer for the Swedish Nobel family’s oil holdings. Baibakov graduated from the Azerbaijan Industrial University and began working in the oil fields in 1932. He advanced quickly, and joined the Communist Party in 1939. After the war, Baibakov was named a Hero of Socialist Labor, the USSR’s highest civilian honor.

For most of the postwar period, Baibakov was a deputy of the Soviet Supreme Council, and served in numerous government posts. While serving as deputy Soviet premier in the mid-1960s, he helped start several joint oil ventures with Iran.

He survived an assassination attempt on a state visit to Japan in 1968 when a 26-year-old man upset about the Kuril Islands — once Japanese territory — attacked him with a wooden sword. In 1981, the Washington Post reported that Baibakov visited Poland to threaten the government with reduced oil supplies if it failed to crack down on the Solidarity movement.

“Just see if the West helps you out,” he was reported to have said. Baibakov liked to go duck hunting with Leonid Brezhnev, but wasn’t afraid to criticize Soviet leadership in later years for complacency. He said Stalin never again threatened him after 1942. “You can’t forgive him for the repression,” he told the Associated Press in 2003. “But on the other hand there was a high level of discipline.”

He told interviewers his greatest achievement was the revitalization of the Soviet oil industry following the war. He remained a prominent figure within the industry, most recently as a trustee of the Gubkin Russian State University of oil and Gas and as chairman of the board of the All-Russian Association of Drilling and Service Contractors.