Who he is and his times
Gleb Maximilianovich Krzhizhanovsky was born in Samara in 1872 and died in Moscow in 1959. He graduated from the St Petersburg Technological Institute, became interested in Marxism as a student and was one of the leaders of the St Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class together with Vladimir Ulyanov. He was repeatedly arrested and exiled for revolutionary activity. The wider public also knows him as the author of the Russian lyrics of “Varshavyanka”, but for the history of planning another side of his biography matters — the engineering one.
From 1907 Krzhizhanovsky worked at an electric lighting joint-stock company under L. B. Krasin and R. E. Klasson; from 1910 he ran the Moscow cable network and took part in designing Russia’s first peat-fired power station. According to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, as early as 1915–1916 he was developing the idea of powerful regional power stations running on local fuel and hydro resources and joined into large power systems. This pre-war engineering thinking later became the foundation of the GOELRO plan.
After the revolution, at the end of 1919 Krzhizhanovsky became head of Glavelektro of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), and in February 1920 head of the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia. The country was emerging from the Civil War with its industry, transport and fuel sector in ruins. In such circumstances the very idea of calculating the development of the economy ten to fifteen years ahead looked almost fantastic, and that is precisely why the commission’s document acquired special political weight.
In February 1921 Krzhizhanovsky became the first chairman of the State General Planning Commission — the Gosplan of the RSFSR; in August 1923 he briefly headed the USSR Gosplan, then ceded the post to A. D. Tsyurupa and returned to it from November 1925 to November 1930, when he was replaced by V. V. Kuibyshev. From 1929 he was an academician and until 1939 vice-president of the USSR Academy of Sciences; from 1930 he was the founder and director of the Academy’s Energy Institute. In 1957 he was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labour.
The Gosplan of the 1920s brought together people of very diverse views. Alongside the Bolsheviks worked the former Mensheviks V. G. Groman and V. A. Bazarov; N. D. Kondratiev, a former Socialist Revolutionary and deputy minister of food in the Provisional Government, who represented the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture (Narkomzem); and pre-revolutionary engineers and statisticians. For the chairman this meant constant mediation between a political leadership that demanded quick results and specialists who considered it their duty to speak about the limits of the possible. Krzhizhanovsky was an insider for both sides: an Old Bolshevik and an engineer at the same time.
Main ideas
Krzhizhanovsky’s main idea is simple to formulate and enormous in its consequences: electrification is not a sectoral task but the framework around which all economic life is built. In the introduction to the commission’s proceedings he wrote that drawing up an electrification project meant providing a “red guiding thread” for all constructive economic activity and building the basic “scaffolding” of a single state plan. The plan was conceived not as a list of every product but as supporting infrastructure on which all other decisions depend.
His second principle was a long-term horizon. The GOELRO plan, adopted by the Eighth All-Russian Congress of Soviets on 22 December 1920, was designed for 10–15 years. According to widely cited figures, it provided for the construction of 30 regional power stations with a total capacity of about 1.75 million kW, including, according to the Great Russian Encyclopedia, ten hydroelectric stations with a total capacity of 640 MW. The document linked the power stations to the development of the fuel base, industry, transport and agriculture region by region.
The third principle was reliance on specialists, including pre-revolutionary ones. According to various figures, between two hundred and two hundred and fifty engineers, economists and agronomists were brought into the commission’s work; the commission itself, according to the Russian Historical Society, included 19 scientists. For an authority that was distrustful of “bourgeois specialists” this was a significant compromise: the plan was recognized as a matter of knowledge and not only of political will.
In the debate of the 1920s about the nature of the plan, Krzhizhanovsky is counted among the “teleologists” — those who held that the plan proceeds from set goals and not only from established trends. The terms “teleology” and “genetics” were introduced into the planning literature by V. A. Bazarov; historians usually place Krzhizhanovsky and S. G. Strumilin at the teleological pole. Krzhizhanovsky himself was first and foremost an engineer: for him a goal was expressed in physical objects — stations, lines, capacities — and feasibility was tested by technical calculation.
Under Krzhizhanovsky, Gosplan developed a three-tier architecture of plans that was later regarded as classic. According to the historian D. Khmelnitsky, from 1925–1926 three programmes ran in parallel: short-term annual control figures, a long-term five-year plan and a general plan for 10–15 years. The idea was that the long horizon sets the direction, the five-year plan translates it into an investment programme, and the annual plan refines the targets according to the actual state of affairs. This logic of nested horizons followed directly from the GOELRO experience.
What became of the ideas in practice
The decree of the Council of People’s Commissars establishing Gosplan was adopted on 22 February 1921. The GOELRO commission became the prototype of the new structure, and its chairman became chairman of Gosplan. The commission’s tasks were formulated as drawing up a single nationwide plan and coordinating the production programmes of the agencies with it. In this way an engineering document turned into an institution that was supposed to coordinate the entire economy on a permanent basis.
In the first years of the New Economic Policy (NEP), Gosplan under Krzhizhanovsky was more an expert staff than a command body. The market, private trade and peasant farming operated independently, while the planners tried to foresee their movement and align it with state investment. Gosplan employed economists of very different views — from Strumilin to Bazarov and Groman — who worked out the control figures, that is, annual guidelines for the development of the national economy.
From the mid-1920s the main task became the first five-year plan. At Krzhizhanovsky’s suggestion two variants were prepared — a starting, minimal variant and an optimal one, whose targets were about 20 % higher. In May 1929 the Fifth All-Union Congress of Soviets approved the optimal variant as law. Thus the idea of scenarios, which could have served for an honest comparison of risks, ended in practice with the choice of the most strained variant.
The fate of the general plan is telling. According to Khmelnitsky, from March 1926 its development was led by P. S. Osadchy, in 1928–1930 by the commission of N. A. Kovalevsky, and in 1931–1933 by the commission of G. I. Lomov. Osadchy was arrested in the Industrial Party (Prompartiya) case and convicted in 1931; the agronomist and statistician N. P. Oganovsky, who worked on the agricultural part of the plans, was arrested in March 1930. Long-term planning, conceived as the most “scientific” part of the system, turned out to be the most vulnerable: its authors were the first to face accusations of “wrecking” when their calculations diverged from political expectations.
Events then unfolded without Krzhizhanovsky at the helm. In 1929–1930 the five-year plan targets were raised above the approved variant, and many specialists of Gosplan and VSNKh were arrested in the Industrial Party, Working Peasant Party and Menshevik Union Bureau cases. In November 1930 Krzhizhanovsky was relieved of the leadership of Gosplan. He was not repressed, but he was removed from key economic decisions and concentrated on academic work in energy.
What worked and what did not
The very design of an infrastructure plan worked. Regional power stations and power systems did become the foundation of industrialization, and in Soviet historiography the GOELRO plan was considered fulfilled and overfulfilled by the early 1930s. According to the Russian Historical Society, by 1935 Soviet power generation ranked third in the world after the United States and Germany. Even allowing for the peculiarities of Soviet statistics, the direction chosen in 1920 stood the test of time.
The logic of “anchor nodes” also worked: the plan set a small number of physical objects on which everything else depended and did not try to schedule every item of output. It was precisely this narrow and verifiable framework that made it feasible. A power station can be seen and measured, its capacity and output are easy to check against the plan, and so under GOELRO it was comparatively difficult to report a non-existent result.
What did not work was transferring this engineering experience to the economy as a whole. A power station obeys physics, while prices, peasants’ sowing decisions and labour productivity do not. When Gosplan moved from an infrastructure plan to a five-year plan for the entire national economy, it turned out that target figures could be raised by decree, but real resources could not. The first five-year plan was not fulfilled on many indicators, although it was officially declared fulfilled ahead of schedule; later, in 1987, the journal Kommunist wrote about this openly.
The mechanism of variants did not work either. The starting variant was supposed to serve as insurance in case of a poor harvest or a shortage of investment, but politically it looked like a lack of faith in the country’s strength. The optimal variant was approved, and then the targets were raised further still. The sound practice of scenario planning in itself proved defenceless when the same body both set the goals and reported on their achievement.
The architecture of nested horizons also proved durable. After Stalin’s death, in the late 1950s and the 1960s, the Economic Research Institute of Gosplan (NIEI) under A. N. Efimov restored it as a three-tier system of continuous planning: a general plan for 12–15 years, a five-year plan and an annual plan. As V. A. Pchelkin recounts, Efimov deliberately drew on arguments from the debates of the 1920s, which at that time still could not be cited openly.
Debate and criticism
The main opponents of the teleological approach — the “geneticists” N. D. Kondratiev, V. A. Bazarov, V. G. Groman and others — did not reject the plan, but insisted that it must proceed from objective trends and from equilibrium between industry and agriculture. They warned that once the pre-war level had been restored, growth rates would inevitably fall, and that forcing the pace would lead to imbalances. As chairman of Gosplan, Krzhizhanovsky found himself between these groups: both worked in his agency.
Krzhizhanovsky himself, judging by documents from the first half of the 1920s, sought to involve specialists of different schools. In December 1923, as chairman of the Gosplan of the RSFSR, he instructed the planning commission of Narkomzem to prepare materials on agricultural planning urgently; the work was carried out by Kondratiev and N. P. Oganovsky, and their long-term plan for agriculture and forestry was approved by the Gosplan presidium in the summer of 1925 after a heated discussion. By 1927 the situation had changed, and the same approach came to be regarded as politically alien.
Historians assess his role differently. In Soviet literature he was an almost canonical figure — Lenin’s comrade-in-arms, the author of GOELRO, the founder of Gosplan. Research of recent decades emphasizes that under him Gosplan allowed substantive debate, but Krzhizhanovsky himself was unable, and apparently did not try, to protect his colleagues when the dispute about method turned into criminal cases. Information about his personal position in 1929–1930 varies, and there is little direct documentary confirmation of a conflict with Stalin in the available publications.
There is also a more fundamental criticism. The GOELRO plan was drawn up by a narrow circle of specialists and approved by a congress where discussion amounted to endorsement rather than a choice between alternatives. The goals were set from above, nobody chose them by vote, and fulfilment was checked by the same bodies that had drawn up the plan. For 1920 this was natural, but it was precisely this model — experts propose, the political leadership approves, the agency reports — that later became the norm for all Soviet planning.
Legacy today
The word GOELRO still serves in Russia as a generic name for a large infrastructure plan. It is applied to energy programmes, transport strategies and digital projects alike. There is a simplification in this: the success of the GOELRO plan rested on a clear physical goal, on qualified specialists and on the fact that with power stations the result is visible without reports. When borrowing the name, modern programmes rarely borrow these conditions.
The political meaning of the GOELRO plan was fixed by Lenin’s formula “communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country”, voiced at the same Eighth Congress of Soviets. It made an engineering programme a symbol of the new order. This symbolic status had a downside: it became difficult to discuss the plan as an ordinary technical document, with errors and corrections, and doubt about its figures easily turned into doubt about the political line. This trait was passed on to the subsequent five-year plans.
The Energy Institute founded by Krzhizhanovsky in 1930 became one of the largest centres of energy science. The academic school he supported worked on a unified power system for the country, and the very idea of integrated power systems is a direct continuation of the engineering concept of 1915–1920. This layer of his legacy is the least controversial.
For the history of planning, Krzhizhanovsky matters as an example of where the limits of the engineering approach lie. Where the goal is a physical object with measurable characteristics, a teleological plan works and is easy to verify. Where the decisions of millions of people are involved, a goal-plan without a feedback mechanism and without independent verification quickly turns into a set of wishful figures. This boundary remains relevant for any modern project of state planning.
What open planning takes
- A framework plan for anchor infrastructure: a small number of physical objects with measurable characteristics instead of scheduling the entire economy. In our model this belongs to the goal-setting circuit — infrastructure goals are approved publicly, while work orders within the framework are allocated through auctions and contracts.
- Goals expressed in verifiable physical quantities (capacity, output, length of networks) rather than in an agency’s monetary reports. In our model this is a direct support for the measurement layer and for the measurement certificate, without which no payment is possible.
- Scenarios with explicit assumptions (starting and optimal variants), but with the rule that the choice of scenario and the subsequent comparison with actual results are published. For us this is part of reproducible calculation and revision based on facts: scenarios are fixed by a version of the methodology and are not rewritten retroactively.
What we do not repeat
- Combining in one body the drafting of the plan, oversight of its execution and reporting on results. Gosplan both set goals and assessed their fulfilment, so abandoning the strained variant was politically impossible; our separation rule explicitly prohibits such a structure.
- Approval of goals by a narrow circle of experts with formal endorsement by a congress. Without a democratic goal-setting circuit what remains is technocracy, even if the experts are qualified and honest.
- Transferring the engineering logic of “goal — object — calculation” to areas where the result is made up of the decisions of millions of people. There market feedback is needed, and in care, education and medicine not metrics at all, but human audit.
Links between ideas
Whom the author argued with, whose ideas they developed, whom they answered and whose fate they shared. All links are on the shared graph. Graph of ideas
- Stanislav Strumilin
Practice and institutions →
Both stood at Gosplan’s teleological pole: Krzhizhanovsky headed it, Strumilin drafted the first variants of the five-year plan.
- Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman
Practice and institutions →
Groman and Bazarov developed the control figures at Gosplan, which Krzhizhanovsky headed.
- Nikolai Kondratiev
Practice and institutions →
In 1923 Krzhizhanovsky commissioned an agricultural plan; Kondratiev’s plan was approved by the Gosplan presidium in 1925.
- Nikolai Voznesensky
Practice and institutions →
Two Gosplan chairmen: the engineering long-term plan of the 1920s gave way to wartime mobilisation planning.
Timeline
- 1872
Born in Samara
- 1920
Becomes head of the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia (February)
- 1920
The Eighth All-Russian Congress of Soviets adopts the GOELRO plan (22 December)
- 1921
Decree establishing Gosplan (22 February); Krzhizhanovsky becomes its first chairman
- 1923
Cedes the post of chairman of Gosplan to A. D. Tsyurupa
- 1925
Reappointed chairman of the USSR Gosplan (November)
- 1929
Elected academician and vice-president of the USSR Academy of Sciences; the Fifth Congress of Soviets approves the optimal variant of the first five-year plan
- 1930
Relieved of the leadership of Gosplan (November); founds the Energy Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1957
Awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labour
- 1959
Dies in Moscow on 31 March
Key works
- 1920The Main Tasks of the Electrification of Russia (Osnovnye zadachi elektrifikatsii Rossii)
- 1920Plan for the Electrification of the RSFSR (Plan elektrifikatsii RSFSR), as head of the GOELRO commission
- 1921Economic Problems of the RSFSR and the Work of the State General Planning Commission (Khozyaystvennye problemy RSFSR i raboty Gosudarstvennoy obshcheplanovoy komissii)
- 1927–1928Ten Years of Economic Construction in the USSR (Desyat’ let khozyaystvennogo stroitel’stva v SSSR)
Sources
- Большая российская энциклопедия. ГОЭЛРО план. 2004–2017
- Большая российская энциклопедия. Госплан СССР. 2004–2017
- Президентская библиотека имени Б. Н. Ельцина. Декрет Совета народных комиссаров РСФСР о создании Государственной общеплановой комиссии (Госплан). 1921
- В. А. Пчелкин (Экономические стратегии, № 5). Академик А. Н. Ефимов, дебаты 1920-х годов и некоторые проблемы современности. 2018
- В. В. Симонов, Н. К. Фигуровская (Вестник Академии наук СССР, № 4). Экономика здравого смысла. Штрихи к портрету Н. Д. Кондратьева. 1991
- Российское историческое общество. 22 декабря 1920 года был принят Государственный план электрификации России. 2020
- Хронос (биографический указатель). Кржижановский Глеб Максимилианович. без даты
- Музей Мосэнерго. Выдающиеся личности: Глеб Максимилианович Кржижановский. без даты
- Википедия. Кржижановский, Глеб Максимилианович. 2026
- Википедия. Первая пятилетка. 2026
Prepared from open sources. Dates, titles and quotations were checked against the source list at the bottom of the page; where sources disagree, the text says so.