INTRODUCTORY NOTE

An economic plan is based both on targets determined by policy makers and on forecasts, which are estimated magnitudes (e.g., the size of the harvest) established by planners and statisticians.

The controversies of the 1920’s on planning principles and methods raged around the following problems: (a) To what extent must the policy maker, in selecting his targets, take into account past economic trends and “regularities’? (b) To what extent must the planner aim at achieving consistency among all the targets set and all the forecasts? (c) To what extent must the planner build into the final plan provisions for emergencies, bottlenecks, and drawbacks?

The economists Groman and Bazarov emphasized the importance of certain constraints under which the policy maker necessarily operates when he makes his selections—namely, limitations of capacity, specific relationships between sectors of the economy, and existing commitments. The Communist planners—Strumilin for instance—stressed the importance of the time element in planning: in the long run, the planner may indeed be less and less limited by certain previous constraints, whether in respect to crucial capacities and outputs, sectoral relationships, or commitments. While Groman and Bazarov were drawing the attention of the policy maker to the importance of short-run or of medium-run relationships, Strumilin was pointing out the possibility of significantly reshuffling, in the long run, the economy’s parameters. With almost mystical zeal, the Communist planners spread the illusion that indeed everything was possible “sometime in the future;” accordingly, the bureaucrats discarded the idea of any constraints, proceeded to formulate the most ambitious and often conflicting targets, and geared the efforts of the economy as a whole toward fulfilling at all cost the top heavy-industry priorities, the “levers” of future restructuring of the economy. The idea of consistency in planning was eliminated from Soviet planning literature. What was emphasized from then on was the necessity for sufficient elbow room for the planner—so-called “maneuverability”—and his capacity to insure the fulfillment of key targets and to solve the most pressing contingencies which might arise as the execution of the plan unfolded.

Deriding the glorification of arbitrariness in planning, Kondrat’ev, Fel’dman, and others suggested various solutions by means of which all the plan targets could be selected once the policy makers had expressed certain basic preferences, and by means of which targets and forecasts could be blended into a consistent plan. Applying this method (discussed in Parts One and Two above), Fel’dman pointed out how one can select optimally the rate of growth of the economy as a whole, given a set sectoral pattern. But Kondrat’ev’s, Fel’dman’s, and various other critiques were rejected, their proponents tracked down as pessimists and saboteurs, while official planning was launched, full steam ahead, on the course of intuition and “maneuverability.”

Discarding the attempts of those who in the early phases of planning were already groping for a scientific solution, but stressing that key assignments must be “realistically” set, Strumilin—in “Answer to Our Critics”—expressed the official contempt for anyone who could not see that the whole “point of Soviet planning” was simply “to concentrate the will and efforts of the workers and the economists on certain selected objectives.” As will be seen from the following excerpts concerning the methodology both of the Control Figures and of the first Five-Year Plan, no systematic method of bringing into agreement all the targets and forecasts was attempted in the planning procedure of the period. The selections give a detailed view both of the positions taken in the planning controversies and of the methods used in planning practice—assumptions and methods which have remained until today the basis of Soviet planning.