Nikolai Baibakov, who served as Josef Stalin's oil commissar and later guided the Soviet Union's planned economy for two decades, has died. He was 97.

Baibakov, who died of pneumonia on Monday in Moscow, was believed to have been the last living commissar to serve under Stalin. He was also thought to have been one of the last surviving witnesses of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's historic secret speech denouncing Stalin at the 1956 Soviet Communist Party congress.

Baibakov served as Russia's deputy oil commissar during World War II. He was named Stalin's oil commissioner in 1944 and was fired in 1985 by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 1942, Stalin summoned Baibakov and told him he would be shot if the advancing Nazi army seized oil wells in Soviet Azerbaijan, he recalled in an 1998 interview with Petroleum Economist magazine. Stalin warned Baibakov that he would also be shot if, after the war, the wells couldn't be returned to production.

Baibakov fulfilled both orders, surviving to launch the Soviet Union's postwar development of oil and gas deposits in Siberia. He pushed for massive investment in the industry that would become the backbone of Soviet Union's planned economy and the foundation for post-Soviet Russia's booming economy.

Former Rep. Bill Dickinson, a Democrat-turned-Republican who championed a strong defense and helped make Alabama a two-party state, has died. He was 82.

Dickinson died Monday at his Montgomery, Ala., home after suffering from colon cancer.

Dickinson, who served in the House from 1965 to 1993, was one of several Democrats recruited to change parties in 1964 and run as Republicans for Congress in a state that had been solidly Democratic for a century.

Former chief of staff Clay Swanzy recalled that Dickinson had to run ads educating voters used to voting the straight Democratic ticket about how to split their ballots between Democrats and Republicans.

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