In the era before the revolution, the Imperial Russian Technical Society (IRTS) was the most important and oldest technical organization in Russia. Founded in 1866 in St. Petersburg on the model of similar societies across Europe, it brought together scientists, engineers, and other people interested in promoting technological development. Subsidized by the Ministry of Public Education, the Ministry of Finances, and other government agencies, and by industry, it focused on inventions and the application of technology in order to further the development of Russia’s manufacturing and production industries and foster the country’s overall industrial and economic growth. Headed by scientists such as chemist Dmitry I. Mendeleyev and military engineer and chemist Count Kochubei, IRTS encouraged greater cooperation between government and the world of science, technology, and industry.
The members of IRTS were concerned about the output of Russia’s weak private sector and felt that the technology policy of the tsarist state was inadequate, especially in the military sphere. This view was confirmed by the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), and in fact it was not until then that the government began to encourage IRTS in its support of aviation. World War I provided IRTS with another opportunity to demand greater state support for scientific and technological research.
From the outset IRTS was strongly committed to the dissemination of technical education, favoring the polytechnic model at the university level rather than specialized institutes, because students in schools of the former type would be more creative and flexible in their future jobs. In addition to technical schools and special classes, it conducted night schools for adults. It also tried to popularize technological development by organizing a technical library, a technical museum, and an itinerant museum, and by publishing science books for technical schools. As early as 1867 IRTS started publishing a magazine, Notes from the Imperial Russian Technical Society (Zapiski IRTO), and organizing meetings on technical subjects and on technical and professional training. Finally, it distributed awards and medals in support and reward of inventions and research and applications in the field of technology.
IRTS was a national organization and had a network of correspondents throughout Russia. Starting in the 1860s it had offices in many provinces. By 1896 there were twenty-three of these, some of which published their own magazines. In 1914 IRTS had two thousand members, four times as many as when it began. The Russian Technical Society continued its activities until 1929, when it was eliminated on the grounds that it was an organization of bourgeois specialists. See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; MENDELEYEV, DMITRY IVANOVICH; MOSCOW AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY; SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bailes, Kendall E. (1978). Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin. Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917-1941. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Balzer, Harley D. (1980). “Educating Engineers: Economic Politics and Technical Training in Tsarist Russia.” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania. Balzer, Harley D. (1983). “The Imperial Russian Technical Society.” In The Modern Encyclopedia of Russian and Soviet History, edited by Joseph L. Wieczynski, Vol. 32, 176-180. Gulf Breeze, FL: Academic International Press. Balzer, Harley D. (1996). “The Engineering Profession in Tsarist Russia.” In Russia’s Missing Middle Class: The Professions in Russian History, edited by Harley D. Balzer, 55-88. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Blackwell, William. (1968). The Beginning of Russian Industrialization. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
The period of the first Five-Year Plans and the rapid collectivization of Soviet agriculture, 1929-1937, witnessed rapid economic growth accompanied by radical changes in the structure of the Soviet economy-first, from a predominantly agricultural towards an industrial one, and second, within industry, from a predominantly smaller- scale economy of light and consumer industries, to heavy industry, machinery, construction, and transportation. The vast expansion and mass production of heavy manufacturing goods reduced their cost of production, relative to those of light industry and of agricultural products. This phenomenon of simultaneous changes in the structure of production and relative prices during periods of rapid economic growth in the Soviet context was discovered and analyzed by Alexander Gerschenkron when he estimated the rate of economic growth of Soviet manufacturing during this period. Growth of the national product (GNP) of a country is estimated by a quantity index, aggregating the growth of production of individual sectors by assigning to each sector a “weight” corresponding to the average price of the products of this sector at a certain point of time during the period under investigation. It has been demonstrated that when the relative prices of the expanding sector are declining, as in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, the index produces a much higher rate of growth when prices of the initial period are used as weights than the index that uses prices at the end of the period. The first is called a Laspeyres index and the second a Paasche index, both named after their developers. Under the Laspeyres index, relatively higher prices, and hence larger weights, are assigned to faster growing sectors, thus producing a higher aggregate rate of growth, and vice versa. Hence the term “index number relativity.”
One commonly quoted calculation of the two indexes for the period 1928 to 1937 is Abram Berg-son’s: According to his estimates Soviet GNP grew over that period by 2.65 times according to the Laspeyres variant but only by 1.54 times according to the Paasche index (1961, Table 18, p. 93). The two measures apparently present two very different views on the achievements of the Soviet economy during this crucial period, as well as on the estimates of economic growth over the longer run. However, since both are “true,” they must be telling the same story. One commonly used “solution” to dealing with this relativity was to use the (geometric) average of the two estimates. An alternative was to replace both measures by a Divisia index (also named after its developer) that calculates growth for every year separately using prices of that year as weights, and then add up all growth rates for the entire period. The outcome is usually not far away from the average of the Laspeyres and Paasche indexes. Subsequent estimates of Soviet GDP growth over this period offered a variety of amendments to the original ones; some among them narrowed the gap between the two indices. During the rest of the Soviet period, the second half of the twentieth century, index number relativity did not play an important role, mostly because the major structural changes were accomplished already before World War II. See also: COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; ECONOMIC GROWTH, SOVIET; FIVE-YEAR PLANS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bergson, Abram. (1961). The Real National Income of Soviet Russia since 1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gerschenkron, Alexander. (1947). “The Soviet Indexes of Industrial Production.” Review of Economics and Statistics 29:217-226.
As distinct from directive planning, as practiced in the Soviet Union from 1928 onward, indicative planning is a set of consistent numerical projections
of the economic future without specific incentives for their fulfillment. Rather, the indicative plan is conceived as coordinated information that guides the choices of separate entities in the market economy.
The first indicative plans were those made up by Gosplan in the USSR during the mid-1920s. These were soon integrated into mandatory instructions issued by the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), later by Gosplan itself. The output plans were supplemented by material balances, inspired by German experience during World War I and generalized as input-output analysis in the work of Wassily Leontief and others.
During and immediately after World War II economists in Continental Europe developed the idea of indicative planning as a guide to recovery and to ongoing short-term economic policy making. Notable were the Central Planning Bureau in the Netherlands, led by Jan Tinbergen, the French Commissariat G?n?ral du Plan, inspired by Jean Monnet, and the Japanese Economic Planning Agency. In all of these, government agencies play a role in collecting and developing the information necessary to build a multi-sectoral econometric model. Such a model allows alternative policy instruments to be tested for their effects on such targets as inflation, the growth rate, and the balance of payments. While indicative planning assumes a primarily private market economy with competition
