A CLOSE-UP OF THE SOVIET FOURTH FIVE-YEAR PLAN.

The article discusses the functioning of Soviet planning with especial focus on the Fourth Five-Year Plan (FYP). If by a plan is meant a well integrated combination of goals for all, or at least all major, economic sectors and factors, the Law on the Five-Year Plan of Restoration and Development of the National Economy of the USSR in 1946-50, hereafter referred to as the Fourth FYP Law, was not a real plan. It was actually an incomplete collection of poorly integrated or entirely unintegrated plans for individual sectors of the Soviet economy. The fragmentary nature and lack of proper tie-ins of the fourth FYP may have been due to insufficient time for its preparation. But the fourth FYP may also have been a step away from the comprehensive, fully tied-in long-range plan which was believed necessary at the inauguration of the FYP's. A subtle implement like good planning is incompatible with dictatorship, with its secrecy, its prosecution of free thought, its encouragement of parrot faculties and other accessories of Soviet "democracy."