tries took part in the work of the commission. The 

 recommendations of the latter were examined and ap- 

 proved by the Scientific-Technical Council of the 

 Ministry of Power and Electrification. Finally, the 

 two principal ministries involved made a joint deci- 

 sion on the matter, which facilitated its solution in 

 a relatively short time, m The whole process il- 

 lustrates the role of expert commissions and the 

 place of bilateral and multilateral consultation in 

 Soviet R&D decision making, and especially in the 

 distribution and coordination of tasks. 



Not all coordination plans were as well formulated 

 and organized as the above example, however. Concep- 

 tualization of problems was frequently inadequate so 

 that the coordination plans were "a hodgepodge in- 

 stead of a network of logical systems. "112 Some plans 

 were unwieldy and included activity that was not rel- 

 evant to the problems being addressed. Other plans 

 consisted of small projects inappropriately named 

 "basic problems." Various stages of work and pro- 

 jects were not correlated. Many of the plans were 

 not oriented to goals. Some had no fixed objective 

 at all. Ambiguity in defining goals and assigning 

 tasks led, in turn, to gaps and incoherence in pro- 

 gram development, which resulted ultimately in the 

 delays, cost overruns, and duplication noted earlier. 

 As M. A. Gusakov concluded, "In essence, the mix of 

 tasks for a basic problem is chosen to a large extent 

 by intuition." 113 



The replacement of coordination plans by S&T pro- 

 grams seeks to remedy these deficiencies. Much more 

 than before, the accent is on the actual introduction 

 of R&D results into the economy. Coordination plans 

 usually reached only to the stage of creating proto- 

 types of new items, trying out new processes, or is- 

 suing recommendations for series production. How- 

 ever, some new machines and designs were held up for 

 years at the recommendation stage. The new programs 

 emphasize bringing the R&D forward through the inno- 

 vation phase. Hence, more than 60 percent of the 

 machines, equipment, and instruments as well as 80 

 percent of the new processes, materials, and data 



147 



