In Passing

Moscow

Nikolai Baibakov, Stalin oil commissar

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

Baibakov, 97, believed to have been the last living commissar to serve under Stalin, died of pneumonia Monday in Moscow, Russia’s gas monopoly Gazprom said.

He also was thought to have been one of the last surviving witnesses of Nikita Khrushchev’s historic “secret speech” denouncing Stalin at the 1956 Soviet Communist Party congress.

Baibakov was named Stalin’s oil commissioner and was fired in 1985 by the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, whose economic and social reforms preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union.

New York

Dith Pran, inspired ‘Killing Fields’

Dith Pran, the Cambodian- born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country’s murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film “The Killing Fields,” died March 30. He was 65.

Dith died at a New Jersey hospital of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at the New York Times. Dith had been diagnosed almost three months ago.

Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end in April 1975 and both countries were taken over by Communist forces.

Schanberg helped Dith’s family get out, but was forced to leave his friend behind after the capital fell; they were not reunited until Dith escaped 4 1/2 years later. Eventually, Dith resettled in the United States and went to work as a photographer for the Times.

Dith coined the term “killing fields” for the clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.

Athens, Greece

Jules Dassin, expatriate director

Jules Dassin, 96, an American filmmaker who was blacklisted for alleged communist sympathies and who flourished as an expatriate with the celebrated “Rififi” and “Never on Sunday,” died Monday at an Athens hospital. Agence France-Presse reported that he died of complications from the flu.

Dassin rose to Hollywood prominence in the late 1940s with a series of taut and moody pulp films, including “Brute Force,” “The Naked City” and “Night and the City.”

As he was gaining in critical stature, his career dried up after movie director Edward Dmytryk testified before a congressional committee in 1951 that Dassin was a communist sympathizer. Dassin, who briefly had been a member of the Communist Party in the mid-1930s, went into self-imposed exile in Europe.

He returned to acclaim with “Rififi” (1955), a heist-gone- wrong movie for which he won a best director award at the Cannes Film Festival. Director Francois Truffaut, then a film critic, wrote: “Out of the worst crime novel I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best film noir I have ever seen.”