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Concept
Gosplan
Summary
The State Planning Committee, commonly known as Gosplan (),
was the agency responsible for central economic planning in the Soviet Union. Established in 1921 and remaining in existence until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Gosplan had as its main task the creation and administration of a series of five-year plans governing the economy of the USSR.
The time of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War which followed was a period of virtual economic collapse. Production and distribution of necessary commodities were severely tested as factories were shuttered and major cities such as Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) were depopulated, with urban residents returning to the countryside to claim a place in land redistribution and in order to avoid the unemployment, lack of food, and lack of fuel which had become endemic. By 1919 hyperinflation had emerged, further pushing the struggling economic system of Soviet Russia towards total collapse.
An ad hoc system remembered to history as military communism emerged. The Soviet government's Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense rushed from economic bottleneck to economic bottleneck in a frenzied effort to sustain what remained of Russian industry on behalf of the Red Army, locked in a life or death struggle with the anti-Bolshevik White movement, backed by the foreign military intervention of Great Britain, France, Japan, the United States, and other countries. In the countryside food requisitions, often backed by brute force, took place under the nominal auspices of the People's Commissariat of Agriculture.
In the midst of such chaos the mere idea of long-term economic planning remained a utopian dream during these first years of existence of Soviet Russia. It was not until the Civil War had drawn to a successful conclusion for the Bolsheviks in 1920 that serious attention was paid to the question of systematic planning for the Soviet economy. In March 1920 the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense was given a new name – the Council of Labor and Defense (STO) – and a broader planning mission.
Official source
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