teria of choice. The hierarchy of plans has already 

 been described. Briefly, for definitional purposes, 

 the program-oriented hierarchy is as follows. Im- 

 portant, complex S&T problems are broken down into 

 targets, which in turn are subdivided into projects, 

 operationally the basic unit of research. These may 

 be further subdivided into tasks and even stages. 

 Examples of each generally do not appear simultane- 

 ously in the same plan. Highly aggregated indicators 

 tend to correspond to all-union and branch plans, 

 while detailed indicators are found in plans of per- 

 former organizations. 



Indicators of current technical or economic status 

 are particularly important because they form the ba- 

 sis for all subsequent policy actions. Pertinent in- 

 dicators, of course, reflect the R&D orientation of 

 the particular decision -making unit, but they also 

 show what the decision maker believes to be impor- 

 tant. There is, then, a kind of circularity here: 

 indicators which the performer knows to be evaluative 

 influence his project selection and conduct. 



In general, Soviet planning of science and tech- 

 nology has lacked until recently any formalized and 

 uniform set of indicators to guide strategy and pol- 

 icy development. Individual ministries have followed 

 different and often outdated regulations as well as 

 specific orders and sometimes contradictory explana- 

 tions of various agencies. Even the names and struc- 

 ture of R&D plans have varied from one branch to an- 

 other. Among 20 ministries and departments in the 

 Ukraine in 1973, for example, only three used the 

 same indicators in the R&D divisions of their plans. 47 

 Also absent have been any guidelines for effectively 

 linking the planning of R&D to the planning of indus- 

 trial production. 



Significantly, new planning instructions issued by 

 Gosplan in 1974 seek to provide some systematic cri- 

 teria for scientific choice. The instructions stip- 

 ulate that the planning of S&T is an integral part of 

 the planning of scientific and technical progress. 

 Thus, the formulation of five-year and annual plans 



107 



