An examination of the restructuring of the industrial ministries since 1985 is an important aspect of any evaluation of current Soviet economic reform. The traditional ‘command-administrative’ functions and style of the ministries, which function as the ‘transmission belts’ for economic and administrative control between the centre and industrial enterprises, are clearly incompatible with the operation of the ‘socialist market’, the ostensible goal of economic reform. If the ministries are still operating in the same way as they have since the 1930s – whether because they are forced to by ‘objective circumstances’ or because they choose to for their own selfish bureaucratic reasons – we can safely assume that the reform has a long way to go.

There should be no need here to describe the long-standing ‘sins of the ministries’. They have been exhaustively described in the Soviet press in endless stories of bureaucratic misdeeds. Although they have been subjected to less detailed analysis in either the Western or Soviet literature than one might have expected, there are good and clear accounts of the phenomena of vedomstvennost' (usually translated as either sectionalism or departmentalism) and melochnaia opeka (petty tutelage). The first refers to the ministries' habit of protecting their own narrow interests at the cost of all others, including an obsession with autarchy and non-cooperation with other ministries. The second refers to their determination to closely control every detail of the activities of their subordinate enterprises.