Centenary of the GOELRO Plan: Opportunities and Challenges of Planned Economy

Abstract

The State Commission for Electrification of Russia (GOELRO) is the first in the world and, most importantly, successful experience in the development and practical implementation of a long-term plan for the recovery and development of the economy of a large country. It uses the achievements of the third technical and the possibilities of the second social revolution. The Soviet Union was deservedly proud of this experience as an integral part of the socialist mode of production. The GOELRO plan has become such a symbolic phenomenon in the public consciousness that ideas of its repetition have been periodically emerging for 100 years now. The attractiveness of the paradigm for managing the future and the effectiveness of the integrated approach implemented during its development (later developed as a methodology for systemic studies in the energy sector) were so great that not only all socialist but also many capitalist countries followed it. The planned system of the Soviet Union provided record economic growth rates in the 1930s, a unique mobilization capacity in 1941–1945, and a steady rise until the early 1980s. However, in the following years, it became increasingly difficult for such a system to cope with the country’s sprawling and diversified economy. Moreover, this was one of the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia, having abandoned rigid centralized planning, is currently trying to create a system of indicative strategic planning according to Western models but has not really succeeded in this yet. One-hundred years later and almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is a need to comprehend new possibilities of planned economic management. Looking back, one can wonder at the wretchedness of the instruments of planned work in the Soviet Union. The widespread use of computers and the Internet has radically improved the instrumental equipment of planning processes, but their methodological, informational, and model support remains unsatisfactory. The emergence of new means of organizing reporting and generating forecast information, as well as methods for mathematical modeling of the energy sector’s development that meet market conditions, opens up favorable prospects in the context of the fourth (information-digital) transformation of the productive forces of society.