assisted Gosplan with the allocation of key material inputs (funded goods) to the ministries. The reforms of Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin of 1965 assumed, among other things, the assignment to Gossnab of the responsibility for the allocation of producer goods. The ministerial supply organizations that had dominated the rationing of funded goods largely disappeared. The tasks of Gossnab included honing the operational details for detailed assortments of funded goods according to the general allocations outlined by Gosplan. Gossnab acted as an executive arm of Gosplan in matters of supply planning by maintaining actual warehouses and distribution points from which ministries drew materials. Gossnab applied itself to the creation of a wholesale trade system based on direct contracts between suppliers and users. By the late 1970s Gossnab handled only one-half of the value of rationed goods. Despite reform efforts, markets for producer goods failed to emerge, and the traditional system of material supplies and balances continued to function.
Two financial state committees, the Ministry of Finance and the State Bank (Gosbank), worked directly with enterprises, unlike other economic ministries. The Ministry of Finance monitored the use of credit by enterprises (working with the ministries), and was responsible for collections of revenues for the budget. At the local level, Ministry of Finance officials were interested primarily in collecting profit taxes, fixed payments, and capital charges from enterprises. The ministry played an important role in limiting managerial staff positions in state bureaucratic organizations and monitored compliance. Its responsibility for the development and execution of the state budget authorized the Ministry of Finance to give an independent opinion on the correspondence of economic plans to party economic policy-a right that Gosplan did not have.
Banking services were provided by Gosbank. This bank combined the services of a central bank and a commercial bank, but due to the absence of credit and capital markets Gosbank did not perform some traditional banking functions (open market operations, commercial paper transactions, and so forth). The major functions performed by Gosbank were to make short-term loans for working capital (supply of credits in accordance with credit requirements planned by the Ministry of Finance), to oversee enterprise plan fulfillment, to create money, and to monitor payments to the population as a center for all accounts. Therefore, Gosbank acted as the Finance Ministry’s agent by booking the payments of taxes and fees to the state budget through Gosbank accounts while monitoring the flow of wage payments and credit through the economy.
The third group consisted of the State Committee on Prices (Goskomtsen), the State Committee
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on Labor and Wages (Goskomtrud), the State Committee on Science and Technology (Goskomtekhnika), the State Committee on Construction (Gosstroy), and the State Committee on Standards (Goskom-standart). These committees worked primarily in setting rules and establishing norms to be observed by the ministries and their subordinate enterprises. For those goods whose prices were to be set centrally, the State Committee on Prices set the prices; for other goods, it established rules for price setting by individual ministries. The State Committee on Labor and Wages established staffing norms and spelled out the rules of compensation and pay. The State Committee on Science and Technology set norms for scientific work and collaborated with Gosplan on science policy. The State Committee on Construction set standards for documenting construction projects and assisted Gosplan in site and project selection. The State Committee on Standards established rules for judging quality standards.
The main function of state committees was the generation of information useful to the Council of Ministries and Gosplan in making planning decisions. Their information on norms, technology, and quality standards gave Gosplan independent data useful for the evaluation of ministry requests. The rules developed by functional state committees helped the Council of Ministries and Gosplan to constrain the activities of the industrial ministries in order to limit their opportunistic behavior. See also: COMMAND ADMINISTRATIVE ECONOMY; GOS-BANK; GOSPLAN; MINISTRIES, ECONOMIC
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Gregory, Paul R. (1990). Restructuring the Soviet Economic Bureaucracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure. Boston: Addison Wesley.
The Buryats, originally a nomadic herding people of Mongolian stock, live in the South-central region of Siberia, in the territory bordering Mongolia, with Lake Baikal on its western border and Yablonovy Ridge to the east. The Buryats are one of the nationality groups that was recognized by Soviet authorities and had an autonomous republic of its own, along with the Yakuts, the Ossetians, the Komi, Tuvinians, Kalmyks, and Karelians. Of the five republics located east of the Ural Mountains in Asian Russia, four-Buryatia, Gorno-Altay, Khakassia, and Tuva- extend along Russia’s southern border with Mongolia. After the changes of the immediate post-Soviet years, the Buryat Republic, or Buryatia (formerly the Buryat Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, or ASSR), continues to exist in the Russian Federation and is recognized in the Russian constitution passed in 1993. Besides the republics, the constitution recognizes ten autonomous regions, whose status, like that of the republics, is based on the presence of one or two ethnic groups. One of these regions is Aga Buryat, in which Buryats make up 55 percent of the population; the rest are Russians.
One of the largest ethnic groups in Siberia, the Buryats number well over one million in the early twenty-first century. In 1994 the population of the republic was about 1.1 million, of which more than one-third lived in the capital city, Ulan-Ude, which lies at the junction of the Uda and Selenga Rivers. Other cities in Buryatia include Babushkin, Kyakhta, and Zakamensk. All are situated by key rivers, including Barguzin, Upper Angara, and Vitim. Occupying 351,300 square kilometers (135,600 square miles), Buryatia has a continental climate and mountainous terrain, with nearly 70 percent of the region covered by forests.
Contrary to popular belief, Buryatia, and Siberia in general, is not a frozen wasteland year-round. The Siberian winter extends from November to March. In fact, the Siberian flag contains the colors green and white in equal horizontal proportions, with the green representing the Siberian taiga (the largest forest in the world) and the white representing the snow of winter. This taiga shelters vast amounts of minerals, plants, and wildlife, some of which are quite rare and valuable. Along with huge hydroelectric reserves, Buryatia possesses rich stores of bauxite, coal, gold, iron ore, uranium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, tungsten, lignite, graphite, shales, mercury, tin, and rare earth minerals. The main industries derive from coal extraction, timber harvesting, textiles, sugar refining (from beets), engineering (including locomotive building and boat repairs), and food processing (mostly wheat and vegetables, such as potatoes).
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The peoples of Siberia fall into three major ethno-linguistic groups: Altaic, Uralic, and Paleo-Siberian. The Buryats are one of the Altaic peoples, speakers of Turkic languages widely distributed in the middle Volga, the southern Ural Mountains, the North Caucasus, and above the Arctic Circle. Buryatia is the center of Buddhism in Russia. In fact, it is a place where three religions coexist peacefully: shamanism, Buddhism, and Orthodoxy. The Siberian region even gave rise to the languages from which the term shaman is derived. Shamanism is a belief in unseen gods, demons, and ancestral spirits responsive only to priests (shamans) with magical and healing powers.
The Buryats have not always been a part of Russia. From 1625 to 1627, the Russian Tsar Mikhail Fyodorovich (first of the Romanov dynasty) sent an expedition to explore the Bratskaya land. This first boat expedition, underestimating the ferocity of the Angara River’s rapids, never completed the journey, but nevertheless word spread that Buryat farmers were eager to trade. Later that century, the Russians-in search of wealth, furs, and gold-annexed and colonized the area. Some Buryats, dissatisfied with the proposed tsarist rule, fled to Mongolia, only to return to their native country saying, “Mongolia’s Khan beheads culprits, but the Russian Tsar just flogs them. Let us become subjects of the Russian Tsar.” In 1923 the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was founded, which consisted of the land on which Buryats lived. Fourteen years later, in 1937, Buryat was forced to split to into three parts: the Buryat-Mongol ASSR, and the Irkutsk and the Chita provinces. That population division remains in the post-Soviet era. During the 1970s Soviet authorities forbade Buryats from teaching the
