Every year, every enterprise in the Soviet Union had to agree a tekhpromfinplan with the organisation it reported to. The tekhpromfinplan covered finance for the enterprise, and the technology it would be using over the next twelve months, but most importantly it stated targets for production. It specified what the enterprise must produce, and in what quantity, and at what quality, in order to fulfil its plan. There were bonuses for the managers if they overfulfilled the plan, penalties if they underfulfilled it. Exactly how the tekhpromfinplan was worked out kept changing, as initiatives from the top restlessly rejigged the Soviet Union’s bureaucracy. But there were always three main players. There was the enterprise, down at the bottom; there was Gosplan, up at the top; and in the middle, there would be an intermediary. Sometimes the intermediary gathered together all the enterprises working in one particular area of industry, and then it would be called a ‘ministry’. Minradioprom, for instance, the Ministry for Radio Production. But at the time we are talking about, the intermediary was a sovnarkhoz, a regional economic council, which gathered together all the enterprises in one geographical zone of the country, no matter what products they made.
If you were reading the official descriptions of the system published bGosplan, you would think it worked liked this. Every spring, as the Soviet Union’s rivers broke up into granitas of wet ice, Gosplan analysed last year’s performance figures, paying close attention to the strategic priorities for the economy, and the big picture of the march to communist abundance. But before it had quite finished – alas, there was never enough time to do things in strict sequence, and the year’s work tended all to proceed via estimates, later corrected – the zaiavki, the ‘indents’, had already been sent out to the enterprises. On these printed forms, the enterprises requested the supplies they would need for next year’s production. But the enterprise, of course, did not yet know how much it was going to be asked to manufacture. So management would estimate how much coal, gas, electricity, wool, ammonia, copper piping, polystyrene etc. it might need, one material per printed form, on the basis of a plausible percentage rise from its output last year. Around about the end of June, Gosplan would complete the set of draft production targets. They, descending from Gosplan, would arrive in the offices of the sovnarkhoz at the same time as the ascending mass of zaiavki and production proposals from the enterprises, and a period of negotiation then followed in which the sovnarkhoz and the enterprises together explored the true productive possibilities of the enterprises. Gosplan’s ‘control figures’ came in a highly aggregated form, for ease of handling: general categories of production, from ferrous metals to foodstuffs. It was up to the sovnarkhoz to disaggregate them into the actual products its region produced, and to divide the making of them between its enterprises. Needless to say, the management of the enterprise might prefer a looser plan, and a more generous flow of materials, than suited the overall interests of the economy. Negotiation continued until the sovnarkhoz had imposed on the enterprise a taut but not impossible level of output and a lean but not impossible level of inputs. Then, around the end of September, the sovnarkhoz combined all of the adjusted zaiavki and production targets for its region and sent them on to Gosplan.
Gosplan added up all of the zaiavki from round the country to give a figure for the total demand for each commodity, and added up all of the production targets to give a figure for each commodity’s total supply. This was called ‘the method of balances’. It ensured that, at every upward step of the socialist economy, the quantity of each product the USSR produced always balanced the quantity of each product that was required. But it might be that the two figures, at first, did not quite match. Then there would follow a second period of negotiation, this time between Gosplan and the various sovnarkhozy, with Gosplan doing its best to limit demand (or at least to prioritise it on the most strategic sectors) and to expand supply. Negotiation continued until Gosplan had agreed with the sovnarkhozy, in turn, a challenging but manageable programme of production. The economy once balanced, the Council of Ministers signed off Gosplan’s work in late October, just allowing time for the final production targets and supply quotas to be passed down to the sovnarkhozy, for the sovnarkhozy to divide them between the enterprises, and for the enterprises to go shopping for their needs in the coming year in the vast compendium of the ‘specified classification’, which listed every item produced anywhere in the Soviet Union. This last pulse of paperwork passed throu the economy in early December. With their order-books now filled firmly for the coming year, managers could dot the i’s and cross the t’s on their tekhpromfinplan, and (precious document in hand) board the train to deliver it to the sovnarkhoz just before New Year, in a spirit of justified celebration.
All clear so far?
Notes – Introduction
1 Khrushchev gave a speech to an audience of Soviet and Cuban teenagers: see Taubman, Khrushchev, p. 523.
2 Fire hoses were used to wash the blood off the ground: see Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union.
3 Till he had a stroke the following April: see Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 613–14.
4 Contemporary joke: What do you call Khrushchev’s hairdo?: see Graham, ‘A Cultural Analysis of the Russo-Soviet Anekdot’.
5 New cybernetics institutes and departments had sprung up: see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak.
6 But Nemchinov himself was no longer in charge: for a sharp-tongued account of his sudden loss of standing, and the appointment of Academician Fedorenko to TSEMI instead, see Katsenelinboigen, Soviet Economic Thought and Political Power in the USSR. Trying to read the situation from California eight years later, Simon Kassel, Soviet Cybernetics Research: A Preliminary Study of Organisations and Personalities, RAND Corporation report R-909-ARPA (Santa Monica CA, December 1971), pp. 86–7, remarked that Fedorenko seemed to be ‘without observable experience in computer technology or automation’, and wondered whether this was why TSEMI ‘appears to have gradually changed from an economics laboratory, engaged in the realization of a preconceived theoretical system of ideas, into an operational support agency for the Gosplan’. The banner saying ‘Comrades, Let’s Optimise!’ was seen by Michael Ellman on a research visit to Moscow in the mid-sixties: Ellman, Soviet Planning Today.
7 ‘The main task,’ he had told a new conference at Akademgorodok: see V. Kossov, Yu. Finkelstein, A. Modin, ‘Mathematical Methods and Electronic Computers in Economics and Planning’ [report of Novosibirsk conferences, October and December 1962], Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 6 no. 7, November 1963; originally in Planovoe Khozyaistvo no. 2, 1963.
8 Academician Glushkov’s group down in Kiev: see, again, Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, pp. 271–4, and for Glushkov’s life history and the story of his negotiations with government, Malinovsky, Pioneers of Soviet Computing, pp. 29–59.
9 An economist from Kharkov by the name of Evsei Liberman: see E.G.Liberman, ‘Planning Production and Standards of Long-Term Operation’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 5 no. 8, December 1962, pp. 16–22; originally in Voprosy Ekonomiki no. 8, 1962. Liberman was interpreted outside the Soviet Union as being the leader of economic reform in general, as in V.G.Tremi, ‘The Politics of Libermanism’, Soviet Studies 19 (1968), pp. 567–72. He was put on the cover of Time – ‘Borrowing from the Capitalists’, Time Magazine, 12 February 1965 – and an answer appeared under his name in the magazine Soviet Life in July 1965, for which see E. G. Liberman, ‘Are We Flirting With Capitalism? Profits and “Profits”’, Problems of Economics (International Arts & Sciences Press, NY) vol. 8 no. 4, August 1965, pp. 36-41.
10 Every enterprise in the Soviet Union had to agree a tekhpromfinplan: for the tekhpromfinplan system, and a mercilessly lucid demonstration of why it could not produce a plan that was either complete or consistent, see Ellman, Planning Problems in the USSR. For the zaiavki (indents) see Herbert S. Levine, ‘The Centralized Planning of Supply in Soviet Industry’, in F
ranklyn Z. Holzman, ed., Readings on the Soviet Economy (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1962).
11 But at the time we are talking about, the intermediary was a sovnarkhoz: see, again in Holzman, ed., Readings on the Soviet Economy, David Granick, ‘An Organizational Model of Soviet Industrial Planning’, and Oleg Hoeffding, ‘The Soviet Industrial Reorganization of 1957’. For an assessment of the effects of Khrushchev’s experiment with the sovmarkhozy, and the planning of production by region rather than ‘branch’, see Nove, Economic History of the USSR.
12 Every spring, as the Soviet Union’s rivers broke up into granitas of wet ice: for the detailed chronology of the planning year, in pristine theory and imperfect practice, see Levine, ‘The Centralized Planning of Supply in Soviet Industry’.
13 All clear so far?: a phrase shamelessly borrowed from the explanation of mid-twenty-first-century US military procurement in Kim Stanley Robinson, The Gold Coast (New York: Tor, 1988).
‘I want the lovely Swan Maiden to stand before me, and through her feathers let her body be seen, and through her body let her bones be seen, and through her bones let it be seen how from bone to bone the marrow flows, like pearls poured from one vessel to another.’
1.
The Method of Balances, 1963
Maksim Maksimovich Mokhov was a very kind man. All of his colleagues remarked on it. When he travelled on buss to the Comecon countries or beyond, he would always bring back a thoughtful little present, and by no means the stereotyped or obvious things for which those places were known. From Bulgaria, for example, he brought back for his secretary a small flask of the genuine attar of roses, presented with a little bow: too strong to be used as perfume in the ordinary way of things, but nevertheless delightful. When she uncorked it, a heavy richness soaked the air of Gosplan, like crimson dye sinking into a bowl of water. From Poland he brought ceramic plaques of kings and knights, as thin and brittle as iced biscuits. From Sweden came children’s toys, beautifully made from wood. Not having any children himself, he gave these to his deputies in the department; and when the seven-year-old daughter of one wrote him a thank-you letter, he replied, covering a sheet of paper in careful script, and replacing many of the nouns with charming little pictures. A horse instead of ‘horse’, for example.
The same consideration, it was said, applied in his private life. His wife had been killed in the siege of Leningrad, when they were both in their later twenties. Although he had never remarried, he had been attached virtually since the end of the war to a woman in a similar position, a young widow then, a rather older widow now. This lady had suffered some sort of street accident a couple of years ago which had injured her face, causing great problems to her and, apparently, ruining what was left of her looks. Maksim Maksimovich had remained devoted throughout, securing the services of the best doctors for her, and taking no steps to replace her with a new mistress, even though it would not have been difficult for a man in hisposition to do so. A number of young women in the building would in fact have been willing, impressed by his fidelity. He received looks of sympathy and admiration when hehanded out the traditional bouquets on Women’s Day. But he seemed content to leave things as they were. Tuesday evenings were the regular time for him and his lady friend to heara concert, or to go to the opera together. He could be seen standing at the mirror in his office, just before he left, tidying his brilliantined hair and making efforts to reduce the diabolical appearance of his bushy eyebrows. Then he would hook his coat jauntily off the hatstand, check the envelope of tickets in his inside pocket and be off down the long corridors, bending his dark head and his spindly shoulders obligingly to acquaintances.
What a mind, though. As sharp as a razor. Even in his kindness, you might feel that he was amused by what he understood of you, and perhaps also by what he understood of himself. In times alike of frenzy, denunciation, desperation, triumph, complaisance and anxiety, he had made himself valuable. He had risen as high as you could go at Gosplan before the posts became purely political appointments; to the top, in other words, of one of its industrial departments, but not into the general policy apparatus at the apex of the pyramid, which tended to be staffed from the Central Committee. Yet, since his was the level at which competence was known to reach its ceiling, people at it were sometimes, paradoxically, a good deal more important than their job title suggested. On paper, Maksim Maksimovich was Deputy Director of the Sector of Chemical and Rubber Goods, responsible for the forty-one strategic commodities in the chemical and synthetic-rubber industries which the notional Directors of the sector rarely had time to contemplate in detail, being (as they were) apparatchiks in a hurry, and often unable to find their arses with both hands, let alone to analyse the accounts of a chemical factory. And this was significant enough, for chemicals were a vital sector at present, growing so fast that it took all the planners’ agility to keep the expansion under control. But in practice much of the day-to-day running of the d appointmeent was handled, in turn, by Maksim Maksimovich’s trusted assistants, because he himself was now being called on flatteringly often by Minister Kosygin, poised right on the very point of the Gosplan pyramid, to act as one of his kitchen cabinet of advisers.
Year by year Maksim Maksimovich understood the stress points, the secret path dependences, of the plan. On a whole range of subjects, he could give you a view of the most refined realism about what was likely to work and what to run into apparently unforeseeable trouble. Moreover, he kept up (so far as Gosplan’s library let him) with Western commentary on the plan, which he could translate into Soviet terms. He could tell you, with beautiful ideological tact, what foreigners meant when they said the Soviet system suffered from ‘suppressed inflation’ or a ‘permanent sellers’ market’. Conversely, he could see where the unfolding developments of the plan might create business opportunities for the Soviet Union in the West. Hence the trips he now found he was taking, not to Romania to talk about nylon, but to Stockholm to help Kosygin talk to the capitalists, riding along in a jump seat of the ministerial Zil, other competent persons from Trade and Finance and Gosbank perched around him. Then an unobtrusive conference room, with the Soviet Union’s technicians of money on one side and the West’s on the other: loans, credits, wheat purchases, petroleum sales. It was impossible for Maksim Maksimovich not to notice that, on the other side of the table, the intelligence types and security men served the bankers, while on his it was the bankers who whispered advice to the commissar. In the West, he saw, the limousine would have been his own. You may be sure that this thought manifested itself only as an invisible addition to the irony of his gaze.
Maksim Maksimovich would probably not have been working the balances himself, this particular October morning, if a plague of flu had not swept through the Gosplan tower, felling several of his subordinates just as the frantic final weeks of plan revision began. The situation was a nuisance: yet how exhilarating to get back into the specifics of the system again, with its never-ending judgement calls, its hidden little psychological games, its lateral complexities. He whistled under his breath as he trundled his famous chair in front of him across the herringbone parquet of the eighteenth floor. The chair was famous because he could trundle it. It was an ingenious East German contrivance, terribly comfortable to sit in, which had four little castors at the end of legs curving out from a central metal column. He had brought it back himself, by train from Berlin, and used it to spin to and fro across his office at alarming speeds. On its seat, two volumes of chemical-industry input co-efficients were weighing down a thin file of correspondence.
‘Going into battle?’ said a passer-by from Non-Ferrous.
‘That’s how the steel was tempered,’ he said.
‘How many down with it, with you?’
‘Eleven so far, and two more suspiciously green. You?’
‘Worse!’
The balances were kept in a long, library-like room lined with filing cabinets, watched over by a librarian-like gorgon at a central desk. Mokhov showed his
pass – though in his case, it was not strictly necessary – and seated himself at a workspace where there was a convenient spare abacus. He shot his cuffs with a touch of theatre, and opened the file. This room had been his playground for many years, and it stimulated him still. In its grey metal drawers this year were 373 folders, each holding work- in-pros on the balance for a commodity. Three hundred and seventy-three commodities: represented, for the most part, in the highest possible state of generality, so that each one of them rolled together under a single heading what was in practice a mass of different products. Yet still they cast only the loosest and most imperfect conceptual net over the prodigious output of the economy as a whole. There were quarter of a million separate items listed in the specified classification of the electro-technical industry alone. You could never capture the activity of something so huge, so irredeemably multiple, in 373 folders. It would have been an absurd error, therefore, to suppose that the room in any substantial sense contained the economy. The best that could be said was that it contained a kind of strategic outline of it. No; that was not quite true. The best that could be said about the room was that it worked, and had done for thirty years. Some of the folders tracked the basics of industrial life: steel, concrete, coal, oil, lumber, electric power. Some were devoted to the food supply, and to agriculture’s inputs of tractors and fertiliser. Some attended to sensitive military items. Some followed the production of very specific pieces of critical machinery, because these were the tools on which whole other sectors depended for their existence. Some paid special attention to new technologies just now being bootstrapped into being. Some concentrated on things many different industries used. It was an ad hoc apparatus, not one generated predictably from a set of axioms. It was not the result of any economic theory. But it functioned. It provided the economy with something necessary: a place where the incompatible demands made on it would reveal themselves, where they finally rose up and required to be reconciled, with whatever finesse a planner could muster. And finesse it needed to be, for the 373 commodities did not exist independently. They were interconnected. A change to the output of one might send ripples of change through many others. At this time of year, teams from the different department were all pursuing the consequences of their own last-minute revisions from folder to folder, trying to make the balances compatible with each other, trying to make the balances balance; before the time ran out, and the revisions had to end, and a summary of the state of the room had to be sent on up to the Council of Ministers for approval, in the form of twenty-two typed volumes of figures, four thousand pages or thereabouts, loaded onto a trolley.
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