Soviet Planning: What and Why Is Relevant in the XXI Century

Planning has become widespread in countries with different socio-economic systems. At the same time, both the evaluation of the results of using planned methods and these planned methods themselves have significant differences. They depend both on the features of the socio-economic systems in which planning was applied, and on the tasks that it solved. To study these dependencies, it is useful to turn to the experience of planning in the USSR, which demonstrates different options for using planning methods. During the years of the new economic policy, planning functioned in the conditions of a broad development of market and capitalist relations. Therefore, the planning methods were adapted to the market conditions. The planning itself was mainly indicative, and the achievement of planned results was built by influencing the economic interests of economic entities. Therefore, it is possible to find a significant similarity in the model of Soviet planning during the years of the new economic policy and those planning methods that were used in the post-war period in Europe, Japan, and then in the new industrial countries. The model of directive planning, which was developed in the USSR in the 1930s of the twentieth century, provided both certain advantages in the development of the economy (the mobilization and concentration of significant masses of resources for deep structural changes in the economy, the implementation of large scientific, technical and social projects), and was burdened with serious contradictions. The Soviet model of directive planning did not have effective institutions that expressed the economic interests of enterprises and their collectives, did not create incentives for technical re-equipment of existing enterprises, and ultimately led to the predominance of the interests of the top government departments. To prevent the development of such contradictions, one-sided reflection of the interests of narrow social groups, the planned system should be built on democratic grounds.

THE VIEW OF FOREIGN ANALYSTS ON THE REFORM OF THE SOVIET PLANNING SYSTEM OF THE 80S OF THE XX CENTURY

The article сonsiders the assessments of attempts to improve the economic mechanism of the USSR in the late 1970s - first half of the 1980s, which are contained in the works of foreign analysts. The paper pays particular attention to their analysis of the effectiveness of the reform of the economic mechanism in 1979, as well as the brigade and collective contracts introduced in the USSR in the early 1980s, and the economic experiment of 1984. The author gives both positive and negative assessments of these transformations in the Soviet economy, notes their strengths and weaknesses. The paper shows that the estimates and data contained in foreign studies allow us correlate the modern interpretation of the economic system in the USSR of the late socialist period.

Reflections of an Authoritative State Administrator on the Late-Soviet and Post-Soviet Evolution of the State Economic Management System [About the Book by E.A. Ivanov «We Need to Search for a New Model of State Management of the Economy (and Can We Take Something from the Soviet Planning for This?)»]

The article is a review of the book indicated in the title, published in 2018 by «Ankil» publishing house. Analyzing the late Soviet (1985–1991) and post-Soviet (after 1991) evolution of the system of state economic management and its effectiveness, while mobilizing extensive factual and statistical material, the author of the book justifies the recommendation to the Russian leadership to stop throwing between the fear of losing «market innocence» and the practice of «smuggling» the use of non-market management methods. While agreeing with this recommendation, the reviewer also shares the opinion of E.A. Ivanov about such an indispensable prerequisite for solving the problems set in the monograph as using the potential of the Federal legislative act on strategic planning that appeared in 2014 (which does not mean that there is no need to improve the adopted specific version of the document).

Cybernetics for the command economy: Foregrounding entropy in late Soviet planning

The Soviet Union had a long and complex relationship with cybernetics, especially in the domain of planning. This article looks at Soviet postwar efforts to draw up plans for the rapidly developing, industrializing, and urbanizing Siberia, where cybernetic models were used to develop a vision of cybernetic socialism. Removed from Moscow bureaucracy and politics, the various planning institutes of the Siberian Academy of Sciences became a key frontier for exploring the potential of cybernetic thinking to offer a necessary corrective to Soviet planning. Researchers there put forth a vision of a dynamic Soviet economy managed through partially automated subsystems, which, while decentralized, would grant the central planning apparatus flexibility, a capacity for emergence, and overall solvency in the face of increasingly complex factors that required consideration.