The Chernobyl commander who built Siberia's oil empire
At 10 a.m. on 27 April 1986, Shcherbina opened the government commission meeting in Pripyat with a single sentence: 'We begin the evacuation.' Thirty-two hours after the explosion, an entire city of 50,000 boarded buses.
The architect of the West Siberian oil and gas complex that made the USSR the world's top hydrocarbon producer. As Tyumen party chief and Minister of Oil and Gas Construction, he drove pipelines, cities, and railways through taiga and permafrost. As Deputy Premier, he personally chaired the government commissions for the Chernobyl disaster (1986) and Armenian earthquake (1988), remaining on site even as radiation exposure deteriorated his health.
Career Timeline
- 1939Volunteered for Winter War, 316th Ski Squadron
- 1942–1944Komsomol Secretary, Kharkov Oblast
- 1951–1961Secretary → 2nd Secretary, Irkutsk Oblast CPSU
- 1961–1973First Secretary, Tyumen Oblast CPSU
- 1973–1984Minister of Construction of Oil & Gas Industry, USSR
- 1984–1989Deputy Chairman, USSR Council of Ministers (fuel & energy)
- 1986Chairman, Chernobyl disaster government commission
- 1988Chairman, Armenian earthquake relief commission
Related historical events
- 1939.11–1940.03The Winter Warvolunteer enlistment
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic Warrailway engineer
- 1986The Chernobyl DisasterChairman of the government commission (on-site command)As Deputy Premier, he arrived in Chernobyl on the evening of the accident and led the government commission on site, making the decision to evacuate Pripyat's 50,000 residents and directing the firefighting, 10km and 30km zone evacuation, and construction of the sarcophagus.
Architect of the West Siberian Oil and Gas Complex
When Shcherbina arrived as First Secretary of Tyumen Oblast in 1961, he submitted a memorandum to the Central Committee within six months arguing the vast oil and gas potential of West Siberia. Fewer than 10 percent of the region's known reserves had been mapped at the time, but Shcherbina was convinced that beneath the taiga lay a hydrocarbon sea. The Council of Ministers adopted measures to expand geological exploration in 1962, and within a decade the Shaim, Megion, and Samotlor fields were discovered in succession. Tyumen's crude output surged from 210,000 tons in 1964 to 88 million tons in 1973, while natural gas production grew exponentially after its first delivery in 1966.
Shcherbina was no mere party bureaucrat. He drove pipelines through permafrost and swamp, built cities like Surgut and Nizhnevartovsk in the middle of the taiga, laid the Tyumen–Surgut railway, and dotted the region with airfields. He mobilized the Komsomol to attract young workers and insisted on building housing, schools, and hospitals alongside the wells so that people would stay. In 1970, he took the unusual step of publicly disclosing the estimated reserves of the Samotlor field through the newspaper Sovetskaya Rossiya, a field later confirmed as one of the largest in the world.
Promoted to Minister of Construction of Oil and Gas Industries in 1973, Shcherbina never loosened his grip on Siberian operations. He accelerated the Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod pipeline, 4,500 kilometres from West Siberia to the Czechoslovak border, earning the title Hero of Socialist Labour upon its early completion in 1983. When he took office, the USSR lagged behind the United States in hydrocarbon output; by the time he left, the Soviet Union was the world's top oil producer and largest natural gas exporter. The historian Yuri Pribylsky described him as 'a youthful, charming, sensible leader, possessed by a spirit of innovation.'