Planovoye Khozyaistvo Segodnya?

Planovoye Khozyaistvo Segodnya—literally planning economy today—was the name given to the Union of Soviet Sovereign States' evolving system of economic coordination after the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords. Unlike the hierarchical planning apparatus of the old Soviet Union, it attempted to reconcile central directives issued from Moscow with the growing economic independence of the nine constituent republics. The system never achieved stable equilibrium; instead, it drifted steadily toward confederal fragmentation over two decades.

The architects of Planovoye Khozyaistvo Segodnya were pragmatists managing impossible constraints. The departed republics—the Baltic states, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—had simply left. The remaining nine could neither dissolve into market economies nor maintain the vertical command structure of the old Soviet era. The Compromise of Sochi of 1993–1994 established the principle that would define the system: dual-track pricing, which meant that some goods moved at centrally set rates while others sold at market prices. This was intended as a temporary measure to manage the collision between Yeltsin's liberalizers in the Russian Sovereign Republic and the planners in Gorbachev's Union government.

It was not temporary. The dual track hardened into permanent practice, then into permanent exemptions. Energy-producing republics negotiated exceptions to central quotas. Kazakhstan, under Nursultan Nazarbayev, claimed the right to market a portion of its oil independently. Turkmenistan pursued an almost complete fiscal autonomy within the Union structure, using natural gas revenues to fund a state apparatus that barely acknowledged Moscow. The Tajik civil war of the 1990s left that republic so damaged that it fell into a different category altogether—dependent on remittances and Uzbek energy supplies rather than central planning.

The Union Rouble crisis of 1998 exposed the system's incoherence. The currency reform and bond default that followed did not end Planovoye Khozyaistvo Segodnya, but they discredited the planners who administered it. Central control over monetary policy collapsed. Republics began to hold hard currency and commodity reserves outside Union coordination. The Blagoveshchensk Framework of 2005, which tied Union oil exports to China Development Bank credit rather than to Western markets or internal Union distribution, further weakened whatever remained of central planning authority.

The Tyumen Compact of 2014 was its effective end. When Dmitri Sergeyev and the Siberian Economic Council negotiated direct export rights for the oil-producing regions, Planovoye Khozyaistvo Segodnya ceased to exist as anything more than a formal fiction. The Russian Sovereign Republic, Sakha, and the smaller Siberian republics now controlled their own resource sales directly. Energy federalism had replaced planning.

Scholars debate what killed it. The revisionist account, associated with the Nazarbayev Center for Eurasian Studies, holds that the system was never viable after 1992, and that Planovoye Khozyaistvo Segodnya was merely the managed decline of central planning authority. The institutional view, presented in Fundamentals of Confederal Economics, argues that it could have survived with stronger Union fiscal authority, but that the republics' competing interests and the absence of a real confederation-wide political will left it starving for resources and enforcement. A third school points to China's financial dominance after 2005 as the fatal blow, since Union planners no longer controlled the primary currency flows that might have enforced their authority.

What survives is the archive: procurement records from Union ministries, pricing directives, trade balances between republics, the memoranda recording the Vienna Monitoring Office's warnings about the system's fragmentation. The Archives of the Russian Presidential Library preserve the internal assessments of Yeltsin's advisors, who understood by the late 1990s that they were administering a system that no longer answered to central commands. The Oral History Project: Voices from 1992 captured planners and factory managers in the spring of 1992 describing what they thought Planovoye Khozyaistvo Segodnya would be—a reasonable middle ground between the command economy and market chaos. None of them anticipated that it would become a gradual transfer of every real lever of economic power to the drifting periphery.