Word: gosplan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Department of Energy or the Pentagon. Of course, there is a problem. Public organizations work less efficiently than do private ones, which are eliminated if they are not competitive." The law of the land for the Soviet economy is the national Five-Year Plan. The State Planning Committee (GOSPLAN) allocates all investment capital, sets every price and production goal and determines all foreign trade. The plan, which sets policy for some 350,000 enterprises, affects every Soviet citizen. Lawyers must try their quota of cases, barbers must shear so many heads and taxi drivers must log so many miles...
Examples of Soviet-style conservatism are widespread. The Soviet chemical industry was reportedly unable to replace corrosion-prone cast iron pipes with more up-to-date plastic piping because no factory could be persuaded to make the lighter product. Reason: pipe production quotas are set by GOSPLAN in tons, and any factory that switched from cast iron to plastic pipe output would immediately fall behind in its production quotas...
...five years. Hardly any school or library is without at least one machine, and the Xerox seems to have replaced the water cooler as an office social center. The isolated Havasupai Indians on the floor of the Grand Canyon turn out their tribal newsletter on two Xerox 660s. Gosplan, the state planning committee of the U.S.S.R., reproduces many of its official documents on Xerox machines. As a result of the galloping ubiquity of office copiers, hardly anyone nowadays passes up an opportunity to use one. "It's a machine that generates its own demand, like cocktail nuts," says Boston...
Economically Screwy. The Russians, said MacRae, "did us really proud" in setting up interviews on economic problems, but they growled nyet to requests for a tour of Moscow's auto factory, a visit to Kazakhstan's troubled "virgin lands" program, a trip to Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad). "At Gosplan," said MacRae, "they were deliberately stonewalling us on some questions. We could see some of the younger Russians growing restive when they had to sit and listen silently to the older men give us evasive answers...
Khrushchev also drastically reduced the powers of Gosplan, the government planning body that he blames for most of Russia's economic failures, and established a new agency, the Council of the National Economy, headed by Economic Boss Veniamin E. Dymshits. Khrushchev also set up a new national construction monopoly designed to eliminate the squandering of money and labor in regional building projects. Almost equally wasteful, complained Khrushchev, are bribery and theft by "leading officials," who stole $61 million in money and materials during the first six months of the year. To fight such economic crimes, Khrushchev ordered the creation...