[1] After completing his military service, in January 1937, he returned to Azerbaijan and received rapid promotion during the Great Purge.

In 1941-42, Baibakov was responsible for evacuating oil industry facilities from Baku, Kuban and the North Caucasus to the eastern regions during the Nazi invasion.

The historian, Robert Conquest, interpreted this as a maneouvre by Nikita Khrushchev to undermine his main rival, Georgy Malenkov in the struggle to succeed the former dictator, Joseph Stalin, with Baibakov being promoted because he was 'pliable', and not linked to either faction.

[7] But he did not hold the post for long, evidently having clashed with Khrushchev, who had supplanted Malenkov as chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers.

In March 1958, he was appointed head of the Krasnodar regional economic council - a further demotion which meant that he lost his seat on the Central Committee, though in his memoirs he referred to this period as one he remembered "with special warmth.