Last Soviet gas minister who turned his ministry into Gazprom
When the Orsk party committee sought to pull him from the factory floor into the apparatus, Chernomyrdin later recalled: 'I felt I was a production man and wanted to stay at my native factory. But life decided otherwise.' He considered himself a production man, not a party functionary, all his life.
Born into an Orenburg Cossack family, Chernomyrdin rose from mechanic at the Orsk oil refinery to director of the Orenburg gas-processing plant, and in 1985 became the Soviet Union's Minister of the Gas Industry. While minister he also served on the CPSU Central Committee (1986–1990) and as a deputy in both the USSR and RSFSR Supreme Soviets, emerging as a central figure in late-Soviet energy administration. In 1989 he abolished his own ministry and transformed it into Gazprom, the state gas concern that would become the world's largest gas monopoly, a pioneering conversion of a Soviet planned-economy ministry into a state-owned corporation that became the cornerstone of Russia's post-Soviet economy.
Career Timeline
- 1960–1973Mechanic and operator at Orsk refinery, deputy chief engineer and director of Orenburg gas-processing plant
- 1973–1982Industrial administrator in Orsk party committee and CPSU CC heavy industry department
- 1982–1985Deputy Minister of Gas Industry of the USSR, head of Tyumengazprom
- 1985–1989Minister of Gas Industry of the USSR
- 1989–1992Founded state gas concern Gazprom, first chairman of the board
- 1984–1990Deputy of USSR and RSFSR Supreme Soviets, member of CPSU Central Committee
Related historical events
The gas man who turned a ministry into a company
Viktor Chernomyrdin was born in 1938 in a Cossack village in Orenburg province and began work as a mechanic at the Orsk refinery. Earning his degree at night school and his standing on the shop floor, he rose through the Orenburg gas-processing plant to the command of the Siberian gas fields, becoming Soviet minister of the gas industry in 1985. In the 1980s, with oil output stalling, gas was the Soviet economy's last engine of growth, and he stood at the industry's summit, a manager of the production floor.
In 1989 he did something without precedent in the Soviet bureaucracy: he abolished his own ministry and converted its entire assets into the state concern Gazprom. The stated ground was managerial efficiency; the result ran deeper. A ministry of the planned economy became, whole, a company, the organisation that would grow into the world's largest gas firm and the prototype of Russian state capitalism.
When the union dissolved, the ministries vanished but Gazprom survived. That knack for carrying assets through the ruin of institutions by changing only their form was a preview of how he would later endure six years as premier of transition Russia.
Six years as premier of the transition: we wanted it better, it came out as always
When the Congress of People's Deputies rejected Gaidar in December 1992, Yeltsin made Chernomyrdin premier as a man both reformers and industrial officials could bear. He went on to last more than five years, the longest-serving premier of Russia's turbulent 1990s. To slow radical reform without reversing it: that was his art of government.
At a 1993 press conference explaining the banknote exchange fiasco he produced the sentence that became a Russian proverb: we wanted it to be better, but it turned out as always. During the 1995 Budyonnovsk hospital hostage crisis he picked up the telephone before live cameras and negotiated directly with the Chechen commander, saving hundreds of hostages; his shout, Shamil Basayev, speak louder, entered the soundscape of the age.
In March 1998 Yeltsin dismissed him without warning; after the August default he tried to bring him back, and parliament refused twice. Chernomyrdin then served as envoy to Yugoslavia, helping mediate the end of the Kosovo war, and from 2001 spent eight years as ambassador to Ukraine. When he died in 2010, it was said his book of sayings was his true biography.
Chernomyrdinki: the truths left by slips of the tongue
Chernomyrdin is among the most quoted speakers in Russian political history, though the quotations came not from speeches but from slips. His sayings, grammar collapsing, logic tangled, meaning strangely exact, became a folk genre of their own, the chernomyrdinki. Sentences like this has never happened, and here it is again, or whatever party we build, it comes out the CPSU, summed up the absurdity of transition Russia better than any political science.
Intellectuals mocked his inarticulacy; the public heard its own language in it. In an age overflowing with polished lies from the rostrum, the stammered truths that escaped him became, if anything, marks of trust.
In historians' accounts he remains the manager who navigated between catastrophes with neither Gaidar's theory nor Primakov's strategy, only the instincts of the production floor. The Gazprom he built and the sentences he left are twin monuments to how a housekeeper of the planned economy crossed the ruins of the market.