Computerization Makes a New GOSPLAN Not Only Possible but More Effective than Soviet Original, Moscow Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 21 – The digitalization of data about the Russian economy makes the revival of something like the Soviet-era GOSPLAN not only possible but ensures that the future variant will be more effective than the original because computers will supposedly prevent the bottlenecks that plagued the USSR, the Russian government believes.

            Finanz.ru reported that “just as the Russian powers are returning to the rhetoric of the late USSR and the share of the state in GDP continues to increase,” the Russian government is looking to the past for models and is confident computers will solve problems Soviet officials couldn’t (finanz.ru/novosti/aktsii/pravitelstvo-rossii-zadumalo-vozrodit-gosplan-1030909733).

            The portal says that “the plan for the digital transformation of state administration which was confirmed by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin includes the rebirth of state planning at a new technological level,” one in which digitalization of data and computers will allow for real time decisions and corrections.

            At the base of this system, Finanz.ru says, is “’a dynamic model of inter-branch balance,’ the key stone of the doctrine of centralized planning in Soviet times” and often the place where that system failed because Moscow lacked the data it needed to ensure that supply and demand matched each other.

            As many have forgotten, the idea of such centralized planning in the Russian economy was first advanced not by the Soviets but by Russian economist Vladimir Dmitriyev at the end of the nineteenth century. Consequently, the Putin regime can present it as a distinctly Russian approach rather than as any Soviet revival.

            Indeed, moving toward a new form of central planning is fully consistent with Putin’s recent statements that the capitalist economic system has “exhausted itself,” an idea that has been circulating among Russian economists at a minimum of the last four years. (For an early case of its advocacy, see vedomosti.ru/opinion/articles/2017/08/17/729823-sdelat-promishlennost-tsifrovoi.)

            And what these moves to a new GOSPLAN also have behind them, the economics portal says, are the growth of the state’s role in the economy and the demand of society for Sovietization at least in the economy (levada.ru/2021/09/10/kakoj-dolzhna-byt-rossiya-v-predstavlenii-rossiyan/).

            But many Russian analysts are skeptical about how well this plan will work. Digitalization may generate data more quickly and computers will certainly process it faster than humans could, but neither innovation will address the two problems on which the Soviet system foundered: false reporting from below and frequent political intervention from above.

            Those will still be present, and thus despite all the hoopla this week, the new GOSPLAN is likely to play just as negative a role for the Russian economy as its Soviet predecessor did for the economy of the USSR.