Ministry of Radio Industry
In 1954 the Ministry of Radio Industry was established, with responsibility for developing air defense radars and related electronic systems. The radio engineering industry was an industry vital to the armed forces. The Soviets defined this industry as that branch of industry producing equipment and apparatus for wireless telephone and telegraphic communications -- radio broadcasting, television, radar, radio navigation, automation, telemetering instruments, electronic computers, tubes, semiconductors, radio parts, and so forth. In other words, it is what would be call the electronics industry in the United States.
The radio engineering industry of the Soviet Union was essentially a post-World-War-II development, its history covering a brief but active period. Prior to World War II, the various 5-year plans laid the scientific research and industrial basis for the manufacture of radio equipment; but actual production was insignificant. During the war the Soviet Union received huge quantities of radio equipment from the West, principally the United States. Much of the radio industry was uprooted during the war and moved to the eastern regions of the Soviet Union, where it was reestablished and grew rapidly. Realizing her shortcomings in electronics, the Soviet Union following the war assigned high priority to the development of a radio engineering industry.
Soon significant advances in the production of equipment and parts were being claimed by the Soviet radio industry. For example, by 1955 the growth in output of radio equipment had increased, they said, by 1,080 percent over 1940, compared with an overall industrial growth of 300 percent. Yet, in spite of this rapid progress, the radio equipment industry apparently had fallen short of meeting the Soviet Union's booming needs in this vital field. Soviet radio, technical, and general publications, particularly during the first half of 1956 and since, were replete with pleas, exhortations, criticisms, and admonitions urging the industry to increase its output and to improve the quality of all types of radio equipment.
Since the latter half of 1956, there were increasing indications that the Soviets were developing significant production capabilities in electronics. New plants for the production of specialized electronic devices, such as special tubes, ceramic and other radio parts, were constructed during the fifth 5-year plan. All radio plants reportedly are operating on a continuous-line assembly basis. Automatic processes used in the radio components industry had made it possible to produce approximately 1 million capacitators and nearly as many resistors every 24 hours, according to Soviet figures from 1957. The production of advanced electronic devices -- magnetrons, persynetrons, tristrons, travellng wave tubes, and image translators was reported at that time. These were specialized items, required for the further development of radar, navigational aids, missile guidance, and communications. Evidence of Soviet advanced electronics capability was shown by their ability to operate an all-weather strategic bomber force in considerable numbers over great distances into the Arctic, launch an ICBM, and orbit earth satellites.
The 1957 reforms affected plants of the radio engineering industry in two ways: It decentralized administration by transferring jurisdiction over radio plants and organization to regional councils; and it centralized the control of the centralized planning organs over the operation of the radio equipment industry for defense purposes. A list of the plants and the organizations affected by the decentralizing acts of the law was approved by the Supreme Soviet but was not made public. The dates of transfer of these enterprises, as well as of their equipment, material, and other assets were to be set by the USSR Council of Ministries and completed by 1 July 1957. Soviet sources revealed that the two main criticisms of the radio enterprises as that that they did not utilize or incorporate the latest technical developments and that they did not produce enough radio equipment. The 1957 reorganization was designed to overcome both of these shortcomings.
In a speech made before the Supreme Soviet in February 1957 Khrushchev said: "The new direct administration of radio enterprises by the regional councils will spark a tempestuous growth in new techniques, better production techniques, improved development of integrated mechanization and automation, and better specialization and cooperation in production." Under the reorganization, production of equipment by radio plants was to be increased through the local administrations by developing -- quoting from Khrushchev " . . direct connections among the plants, factories, and building sites on the one hand, and their immediate supplies of raw materials and parts as being the best method of supplying andmarketing output, and avoiding the tremendous amounts of time wasted on paper work going through administrative channels."
Under the Ministry of Radio Engineering Industry, liaison between producing plants and radio research institutes was criticized as being poorly organized. An extremely weak spot in the system of scientific establishments was their concentration in the capitals, a situation in which almost 40 percent of the scientific establishments of the RSFSR -- that is Russia itself -- were situated in Moscow and Leningrad. Under the new reorganization, two measures were made to change this situation. Research and design organizations were transferred from the Leningrad-Moscow area to the centers of population in the East, and the majority of research and design organizations were subordinated to the local councils. Thus, under the new reorganization, radio plants in each of the economic regions were to have their own research institute and design bureau. To get an adequate number of research and design organizations, they were to be transferred from Moscow and Leningrad and the other central areas.
Because of the drive for automation and modernization of production processes, the electronics industry increasingly supported many other industrial branches. Special emphasis was given to improving cooperation between electronics plants and the machine-building and metallurgy branches--a partnership severely hindered in many cases by the industrial bureaucracy. In official progress reports, all industries listed process automation and robotization as standards for efficiency and expansion, and conversion from manual processes has been a prime indicator of progress in heavy industry. At the same time, government policy has relied heavily on the electronics industry for televisions, recording equipment, and radios for the consumer market. None of those items came close to planned production quotas for 1987, however.
Beginning in the 1970s, the most important role of the electronics industry was to supply lasers, optics, and computers and to perform research and development on other advanced equipment for weapons guidance, communications, and space systems. The importance of electronics for civilian industry has led to interministry research organizations that encourage the advanced military design sector to share technology with its civilian counterpart. Such an organization was called an interbranch scientific-technical complex (mezhotraslevoi nauchnotekhnicheskii kompleks--MNTK). It united the research and production organizations of several ministries and had broad coordination control over the development of new technologies. Because of the military uses of Soviet electronics, the West has had incomplete specific data about it. In the early 1980s, an estimated 40 percent of Soviet electronics research projects had benefited substantially from the transfer of Western and Japanese technology. In the late 1980s, however, Soviet electronics trailed the West and Japan in most areas of applied electronics, although circuit design and systems engineering programs were comparable. The Soviet theoretical computer base was strong, but equipment and programming were below Western standards. Problems have been chronic in advanced fields such as ion implantation and microelectronics testing. The branches designated by Soviet planners as most critical in the 1980s were industrial robots and manipulators, computerized control systems for industrial machines, and semiconductors for computer circuits.
