Industry, on the other hand, has traditionally had 

 a strong production bias and discriminates against 

 new technology "like the devil shies away from holy 

 water," to use Brezhnev's words. 1° The short time 

 horizon of planning, the general low quality of pre- 

 production work, the absence of adequate in-house R&D 

 services, and all the uncertainties surrounding ma- 

 terial supply and financing for new technology tend 

 to make enterprise managers concentrate on current 

 production operations and minimize the rate of inno- 

 vation. Given the balance of relative risks and re- 

 wards, they find it more advantageous to expand ex- 

 isting production lines than to establish new prod- 

 ucts and processes. In short, the present invariably 

 drives out the future. 19 



The weakness of applied R&D can also be traced to 

 historical and structural factors. Industrial re- 

 search was largely lacking in prerevolutionary Rus- 

 sia, which derived much of its technology and indus- 

 trial capital from the West. The Soviet regime de- 

 cided early to organize and promote applied scien- 

 fic R&D in specialized institutes subordinate direct- 

 ly to the industrial commissariats. The creation of 

 such large, central institutes serving particular 

 branches of Soviet industry as a whole rather than 

 individual plants, it was believed, would build a 

 more effective industrial research establishment than 

 in capitalist states where R&D was fragmented among 

 numerous firms which competed with each other and 

 concealed their innovations if possible. 20 



Since the mid-1960s this pattern of insulating 

 R&D from the normal economic processes has been sub- 

 ject: to mounting criticism. Although the separation 

 of science from production was once seen as playing 

 a positive role in allowing the USSR to develop a 

 strong and autonomous research sector unfettered by 

 excessive industrial claims and demands, it is now 

 perceived as contradicting the interests of both 

 science and production. Today, science, technology, 

 and production are said to be increasingly interact- 

 ing and interdependent processes that develop not in 

 isolation and by themselves but through their linkage 



11 



