Patterns of Growth

Throughout the central planning era, from 1928 on, the Soviet manufacturing industry operated within the framework set by detailed central directives enforced and supervised by the party and by a hierarchical, complex planning and managerial administration. The industry's pattern of growth was shaped by the central plans on the basis of a set of policies, of which the determinant ones were: the Soviet strategy of rapid industrialization with emphasis on heavy industry and military needs; a sustained drive toward wider and wider concentration of plants, workshops, and employment into larger and larger enterprises; and reliance over a long period of time on obsolete equipment within various industries, combined with modernization of other industries and vast investment in new construction. In the second half of the 1980s, a complex project of renewal aimed as usual at accelerating the technological progress, catching up with the technologically advanced industries of the West, and eventually changing the planning system by establishing the enterprise as the primary actor in the Soviet economy. Let me illustrate these policies with some appropriate data.

The Soviet strategy of industrialization commanded the rapid infusion of fixed capital, labor, and raw materials into industry. According to the Soviet data, the industry's capital assets grew after the post–World War II reconstruction and restructuring, in comparable prices by well over nine times in thirty years, namely from 99.6 billion rubles in 1960 to 926 billion by 1990.