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The Mechanization of Accounting in the Soviet Union*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2019

Robert W. Campbell
Robert W. Campbell*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Extract

Planning and centralized direction have led inevitably to great dependence on accounting in the Soviet economy. The Soviet leaders have found that detailed accounting is an indispensable instrument of control in directing the activities of their extended hierarchy of manager-bureaucrats. The effectiveness of accounting as an instrument of control in the Soviet economy has been greatly hampered, however, by its primitive technological level. Throughout the Soviet economy, with only rare exceptions, the bookkeeper has traditionally done his work with pen and ink, with no mechanical aids other than the schëty or an occasional arithmometer.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , February 1958 , pp. 59 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1958

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Footnotes

*

This article is based on a portion of my doctoral dissertation, Soviet Cost Accounting; Rules and Techniques, Harvard University, 1955. I am pleased to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Russian Research Center of Harvard University for its support of this study, and to Professor Alexander Gerschenkron, who originally suggested Soviet accounting as a field of research.

References

1 The schëty is the Russian abacus, used by Russian bookkeepers since very early times. It is in one way an appropriate and productive tool; it is cheap, of simple foolproof construction, and a skilled user can add and subtract on it with great rapidity. However, it is on a completely different level from modern mechanical aids in which the machinery does all the work of computing and at the same time makes the record. The arithmometer is a small, lever-set calculator, operated with a hand crank. It was invented by V. T. Odner, a Russian, in 1874. Because it is lever-set and hand-operated it is relatively unproductive, especially for addition and subtraction.

2 P. Nosov and T. Tirzbanurt, “Mekhanizatsija uchëta i uluchshenie administrativnoupravlencheskogo apparata,” Planove khozjaistvo, 1953, No. 4, p. 94.

3 KPSS v rezolucijakh i reshenijakh, 7th edition, Part II (Moscow, 1954), p. 444.

4 Ibid., p. 599.

5 The text of this report may be found in Tekhnika upravlenija, 1930, No. 6, pp. 253-61.

6 This decree may be found in M. V. Nikolaev, £akonodatel'stvo ob uchëte i otchëtnosti (Moscow, 1933), pp. 12-14.

7 Idem.

8 F. V. Drozdov, “K voprosu o proizvodstve v SSSR schëtnykh mashin,” Tekhnika upravlmija, 1929, No. 2, p. 32.

9 Popov, op. cit., p. 122.

10 I. Kolychev, “Vazhnoe izobretenie,” Den'gi i kredit, 1940, No. 4-5, p. 90.

11 Popov, op. cit., p. 123. The similarity of the Russian machine to the American is underlined by an incident related by one Soviet writer. He explains indignantly that the Germans looted the KSM from the occupied Russian territories, removed the markings and sold them in Prague as American machines. G. P. Evstigneev, “Mashinizirovannyi uchet v SSSR,” Bukhgalterskij uchët, 1947, No. 12, p. 17.

12 G. P. Evstigneev, Organizacija mekhanizirovannogo uchëta (Moscow, 1949), p. 8.

13 The figure for the U. S. is obtained by subtracting from output as shown in the 1937 Census of Manufactures the exports shown in U. S. Department of Commerce, Foreign Trade and Navigation of the United States, for the same year.

14 Popov, op. cit., p. 48.

15 For instance, it is reported in Mashinostroenie, April 14, 1939, that the monthly goal for KSM was only 175 machines in 1939. Another source says that a planned expansion of the Moscow SAM plant to permit production of 125 complexes of punched card machinery in 1938 had not even been started in 1939. Ibid., Nov. 15, 1939.

16 Globa, op. cit., p. 49.

17 Za industrializatsiju, Oct. 10, 1930.

18 Finansovaja gazeta, April 8, 1938.

19 Mashinostroenie, April 29, 1938.

20 Ibid., Jan. 9, 1939.

21 Popov, op. cit., p. 119.

22 Mashinostroenie, Feb. 9, 1938.

23 I. Kolychev, “Vazhnoe izobretenie,” Den'gi i kredit, 1940, No. 4-5, p. 90.

24 For instance the thirty-eight complexes of punched card machinery which had been in operation in the Ministry of Aviation and the Ministry of Shipbuilding before the war were no longer being used at the end of the war. (S. S. Geidish, “Zhurnal, ignorirujushchij voprosy mekhanizacij,” Mekhanizacija trudoemkikh i tjazhelykh Rabat, 1948, No. 10, p. 48.) And in the State Bank at the end of the war only four out of the ten “factories of mechanized accounting” which had been operating in 1941 were still at work. (I, Kolychev, “O mashinizirovannom uchete v Gosbanke,” Den'gi i Kredit, 1946, No. 6-7, p. 13.)

25 Earlier decrees were those of May, 1945, and October, 1947. The texts of these decrees were never published, but the general nature of their provisions is found in some of the general discussions of postwar mechanization. See, for instance, I. S. Bulgakov, Schëtnye mashiny (Moscow, 1950), p. 4; G. P. Evstigneev, Organizacija mekhanizirovannogo uchëta (Moscow, 1949), p. 17; A. M. Fissqn, “Serëznyi khozjaistvennyi vopros,” Mekahniza- cija trudoëmkikh i tjazhelykh Robot, 1949, No. 4, and the editorial in Mekhanizacija trudoëmkikh i tjazhelykh Rabat, 1949, No. 7.

26 D. Zhak and T. Tirzbanurt, “O sostojanii mekhanizacij ucheta i vychislitel'nykh 16, No. 6-7, rabot,” Vestnik statistiki, 1952, No. 2, p. 65.

27 Editorial in Mekhanizacija trudoëmkikh i tjazhelykh rabot, 1949, No. 7.

28 Nosov and Tirzbanurt, op. cit. p. 95, and Pravda, Nov. 27, 1953.

29 A list of the plants claimed as reparations may be found in G. W. Harmssen, Am Abend der Demontage (Bremen, 1951), pp. 95-101. The dismantled plants included the Astra-werke and the Wanderer-werke in Chemnitz, the Archimedes plant and a cash register factory in Glasshiitte. There is no specific information on what happened to the dismantled plants, but the fact that the Soviet plant in Riazan', which did not exist before the war, has been producing since the war a line of machines copied from the prewar Astra machines suggests that the dismantled Astra plant may have formed the basis for the Riazan’ plant.

30 A list of the plants which are included in Tochmash may be found in G. W. Harmssen, Reparationen, Sozialprodukt, Lebensstandard (Bremen, 1947), p. 122, and a later list appears in Deutsches Institut fur Wirtschaftsforschung, Wirtschaftsprobleme der Besatzungzonen (Berlin, 1948). The most important accounting machinery plant was the former Rheinmetall- Borsig plant in Sommerda.

31 Bundesministerium für gesamtedeutsche Fragen, Der Aussenhandel der Sowjetischen Besatzungzone Deutschlands.

32 N. A. Ignatov, “Novye sovetskie schetnye mashiny,” Vestnik mashinostroenija, 1950, No. 4.

33 Ministerstvo mashinostroenija i priborostroenija, Preiskurant optovykh tsen na poligraficheskie i schëtnye mashiny (Moscow, 1949), pp. 37-40.

34 M. Sirotin, Planirovanie mekhanizacij trudoëmkikh i tjazhelykh rabot v promyshlennosti SSSR (Moscow, 1953), p. 110.

35 Idem.

36 Zhak and Tirzbanurt, op. cit., p. 65.

37 Geidish, op. cit., p. 48.

38 I. Skobelkin, “Mekhanizirovat’ uchet vo vsekh uchrezhdenijakh Gosbanka,” Den'gi ikredit, 1954, No. 2, p. 18.

39 U. S. Department of Commerce, Facts for Industry, Series M35-03, Office, Computing and Accounting Machines, 1953 (Washington, 1955).

40 A. G. Zverev, “Uluchshat’ i sovershenstvovat’ rabotu gosudarstvennogo apparata,” Kommunist, 1954, No. 16, p. 39.

41 “V upravlenija Sojuzmashucheta TsSU SSSR,” Bukhgalterskij uchët, 1954, No. 4, p. 63.

42 For a more detailed discussion of the inadequacies of Soviet accounting for purposes of control, the reader is referred to my dissertation, Chapter IX.

43 For instance, M. Kh. Zhebrak, one of the outstanding Soviet authorities on accounting, says “the task of industrial accounting consists first of all in the control of plan fulfillment.” Kurs promyshlennogo uchëta, 6th edition (Moscow, 1950), p. 4.

44 See, for instance, A. Vorob'eva, “Puti ukreplenija tsekhovogo khozrascheta,” Voprosy ekonomiki, 1951, No. 4, pp. 48-49; “Nauchno-proizvodstvennaja konferencija po voprosam vnutrizavodskogo khozraschëta, Voprosy ekonomiki, 1951, No. 6, p. 106; and S. K. Tatur, Khozraschet i rentabel'nost’ (Moscow, 1951), p. 146.

45 A. I. Lozinskij, Grafik—osnova racional'noi organizacii uchëta (Moscow, 1946), p.

46 Ibid., passim.

47 See, for instance, the editorials in Bukhgalterskij uchët, 1954, No. 1, p. 7, and 1954, No. 10, p. 2.

48 Lozinskij, op. cit., p. 9.

49 Gosplan SSSR, Vsesojuznaja perepis’ naselenija 1926 goda, Vol. XXXIV, Sojuz sovetjkikh socialisticheskikh respublik, otdel II, Zanjatija (Moscow, 1930), p. 180.

50 I . Sautin, “Naselenie strany socializma,” Bol'shevik, 1940, No. 10, p. 22.

51 U. S. Bureau of the Census, U. S. Census of Population: 1950. Vol. IV, Special Reports, Part 1, Chapter C, Occupation by Industry, (Washington, 1955).

52 Socialisticheskoe stroitel'stvo, 1936, pp. 630-31.

53 For instance, there were only 1,980 bookkeepers, accountants, cashiers, and ticket agents in all of American agriculture in 1940 (U. S. Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940. Population, The Labor Force, Occupational Characteristics, Washington, 1943, p. 15), while in the Soviet economy in 1938 there were 248,390 bookkeepers in the collective farms alone, without the state farms and machine-tractor stations. (Planovoe khozjaistvo, 1939, No. 7, p. 147.)

54 Evstigneev, “Mashinizirovannyi uchët v SSSR,” p. 16.

55 Ministerstvo mashinostroenija i priborostroenija, Preiskurant optovykh tsen na poligra ficheskie i schëlnye mashiny, pp. 37-40.

56 Ginodman, op. cit., p. 240.

57 Idem. ‘The Arc

58 It is said that the productivity of labor rises at least by 2.5 times when punched card The full machines are used, as is shown by the experience of the MSS. (Bukhgalterskij uchet, 1954, l n Russia ai No. 11, p. 1.) Since it takes eight operators to run the complex, the number displaced J- Mill, would theoretically be twelve.