in their tangled branch constituencies, they are 

 themselves at times b.eing regulated and ignored. The 

 ministries do not always accept the recommendations 

 of these central agencies; instead, they pursue their 

 own ways and wishes. 



To be sure, the actual workings of this machinery 

 of coordination are much more complex than implied 

 by the formal organization chart. The key to under- 

 standing Soviet policies lies not so much in the 

 structure of institutions as in the fundamentally bu- 

 reaucratic context in which they operate. The auth- 

 ority and activity of state committees are frequently 

 circumscribed. Caught in a constant cross fire of 

 pressures from competing and powerful organizations, 

 each promoting its own interests and R&D goals, the 

 committees find themselves challenged and constrained 

 at every turn. Given the nature of their overlapping 

 and shared responsibilities for R&D planning and man- 

 agement, the state committees are frequently forced 

 to seek the approval of and some kind of accommoda- 

 tion with various branch ministries, government de- 

 partments, and other state committees, not to mention 

 Party agencies. They are integral parts of a giant 

 maze of bureaucratic subsystems and circles of admin- 

 istrative confusion, rather than standing apart from 

 it. As a result the state committees are forced to 

 perform a continuous and difficult balancing act in 

 which national goals and priorities are reconciled 

 with the special interests of the numerous organiza- 

 tions that comprise and conduct the Soviet R&D ef- 

 fort. This process inevitably involves them in heavy 

 political conflict, bargaining, and compromise. Al- 

 though we still know little about the actual mechan- 

 ics of power and processes of negotiation within the 

 Soviet system, the reality of bureaucratic politics 

 and its imprint on science policy are unmistakable. 



With these caveats in mind, we can now briefly 

 describe the formal functions of the major agencies 

 involved in R&D planning and management at the cen- 

 tral level. Discussion of the Academy of Sciences is 

 taken up in the next section, as the Academy combines 



36 



