# Vitaly Naishul: views on planning and what we take from them — Open Planning
> For ten years Naishul observed the planned economy from the inside — from a research institute attached to Gosplan — and came to the conclusion that by the Brezhnev era…
Источник / Source: https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/naishul
Язык / Language: en
Обновлено / Updated: 2026-09-15
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History of planning · The administrative market: how Gosplan actually worked

# Vitaly Arkadyevich Naishul

b. 1949 · Economist, one of the authors of the theory of the administrative market, author of a samizdat project for privatization through personal (name-registered) vouchers, president of the Institute of the National Model of Economy

For ten years Naishul observed the planned economy from the inside — from a research institute attached to Gosplan — and came to the conclusion that by the Brezhnev era the USSR was governed not by orders but by bargaining among agencies. His “economy of agreements” (ekonomika soglasovaniy) explains why the plan diverged from reality even when the planners were competent, and why neither computers nor successive reforms of plan indicators could fix this. Without this picture it is hard to understand either late Soviet stagnation or what governance turned into after 1991.

_V. A. Naishul. The Highest and Final Stage of Socialism (Vysshaya i poslednyaya stadiya sotsializma, 1990), text on the Moscow Libertarium website (translated by gosplan2.ru)_

Founders

- [Gleb Krzhizhanovsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/krzhizhanovsky)

- [Stanislav Strumilin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/strumilin)

- [Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bazarov-groman)

- [Nikolai Kondratiev](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kondratiev)

Industrialisation

- [Yevgeni Preobrazhensky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/preobrazhensky)

- [Nikolai Bukharin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bukharin)

- [Nikolai Voznesensky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/voznesensky)

Balances and optimal planning

- [Wassily Leontief](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/leontief)

- [Leonid Kantorovich](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kantorovich)

- [Viktor Novozhilov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/novozhilov)

- [Vasily Nemchinov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/nemchinov)

- [Nikolai Fedorenko](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/fedorenko)

Cybernetics and reforms

- [Viktor Glushkov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/glushkov)

- [Evsei Liberman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/liberman)

- [Stafford Beer](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/beer)

- [Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/cockshott)

Critics

- [Ludwig von Mises](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/mises)

- [Friedrich Hayek](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/hayek)

- [Oskar Lange](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/lange)

- [János Kornai](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kornai)

The administrative market

- [Vitaly Naishul](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/naishul)

- [Simon Kordonsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kordonsky)

## Who he is and his times

Vitaly Arkadyevich Naishul was born in Moscow in 1949 and graduated from the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University. In his own words, given in an interview with the journal Neprikosnovenny Zapas (2007), from 1971 to 1981 he worked at a research institute attached to the USSR Gosplan, and then at the Central Economic Mathematical Institute (TsEMI) of the USSR Academy of Sciences. This generation entered economics through mathematics, but, unlike the advocates of the full mathematization of planning in the 1960s, it studied not the calculation of an optimal plan but how decisions were actually made.

Naishul's main conclusions about the planning system took shape in joint work with V. M. Konstantinov and Yu. M. Rodny in 1979–1985; this is stated explicitly in a footnote to his article The Highest and Final Stage of Socialism. The results appeared as a TsEMI preprint, The Technology of Planned Management (Tekhnologiya planovogo upravleniya, 1986). In parallel, in 1985, Naishul wrote a popular book, Another Life (Drugaya zhizn', 1985), which circulated in samizdat. According to Wikipedia, the book was distributed under a pseudonym; according to A. Kolesnikov's account (Vestnik Evropy, 2021), the manuscript circulated in samizdat copies from 1985 onwards.

In the second half of the 1980s, independent circles of economists and sociologists who were studying how the Soviet economy really worked learned of each other's existence. As V. M. Shironin describes it (the journal EKO, 2020), by 1986 the different lines of analysis had converged and later received the name “theory of the administrative market”. Researchers name two groups: a Moscow group that studied Gosplan (Naishul was among its leaders) and a Novosibirsk group that studied a rural district of the Altai Krai (Simon Kordonsky was among its leaders). This account is based on secondary sources, which disagree about the exact date when the groups became acquainted.

In the 1990s Naishul became head of the Institute of the National Model of Economy and gradually shifted his interest from economic reform to the Russian socio-political language and state institutions. This turn matters for assessing his legacy: the later Naishul argues not so much with planners as with those reformers who believed that a market could be built without a stable state. We have not verified the later works of this period against the original texts, so this page is based mainly on his writings of 1985–1990 and interviews of 2002–2007.

## Main ideas

Naishul's central thesis is set out in the article The Highest and Final Stage of Socialism (Vysshaya i poslednyaya stadiya sotsializma; dated 1990, published in book form in the collection Sinking into the Quagmire, 1991). Officially, plans were drawn up by the Central Committee, the Council of Ministers and Gosplan and then handed down as assignments. In reality, Naishul writes, the country ran on an “economy of agreements” — a bureaucratic market in which not only goods were exchanged, but also power, subordination, rules and exemptions from them. He openly traces the term “bureaucratic market” itself to the American economist James Buchanan, who applied it to the US administration.

The mechanism of bargaining is described in detail. Horizontal exchanges take place between relatively equal participants from different hierarchies: a director's consent to a higher plan target can be traded for an improved professional reputation, an extra batch of pipes and permission to break an instruction. Vertical exchanges are unequal: subordination turns into a deal between a strong superior body and a weak one. Each hierarchy trades in what it controls: sectoral bodies in production plans and resource allocation, regulatory bodies in accounting methods, control bodies in instructions, and party bodies in all the values of the system at once. By Naishul's estimate, by the end of the Brezhnev period less than a third of the national product was distributed through traditional planning procedures; the rest was distributed through exchange.

The second key image is the “right of free veto” (liberum veto) held by deputies of the Polish Sejm. Since management has to maintain all balances at once, a decision must suit all the parties affected, and every participant in the approval process gains the ability to block it. Such a system, according to Naishul, is extremely conservative: it postpones any decision until its necessity becomes clear to the last participant. Hence his conclusion that the system of agreements produced stagnation. The veto, however, is not equal: a participant's weight is determined by the ability to reward and punish, large organizations outweigh small ones, decisions are oriented towards the “top”, and management begins to serve itself.

The third idea is the limited resource of management, or the “management bottleneck”. In Another Life it is explained through everyday examples: any new undertaking requires adjustments that go through the “top”, and a jam forms there, so that the question of children's building blocks reaches the Council of Ministers. In the 1990 article the same thought is turned into a general rule: the resource of administrative management cannot be multiplied either by increasing staff (internal links become more complex) or by introducing computers. When the volume of coordination exceeds this resource, growth of the economy itself — of capital, labour and raw materials — may be accompanied not by growth but by a fall in output.

## What became of the ideas in practice

Naishul described what the annual plan looked like from the inside in Another Life (chapter 2, the section “Is there planning in the USSR?”). Enterprises submit requests for resources to the chief directorates (glavki) and ministries, which pass them on to Gosplan. There are almost always more requests than there is capacity to produce the resource, so Gosplan tries to squeeze more out of the producing ministries and to cut the requests of consumers, while the ministries make fulfilment of their assignments conditional on supplies. Bargaining goes on over a huge number of indicators, and it is hard for planners to tell whether the ministries are hiding reserves. By November a compromise is reached, which is declared to be the plan.

After that, according to Naishul, the plan immediately begins to change because it turns out to be unfeasible: some assignments were forced on producers, some are too tight, and some enterprises use the situation to extract concessions. In the end, reports refer not to the November plan but to the last, many times corrected version; five-year plans are revised in the same way. The chapter concludes that the trading in Gosplan can hardly be called planning, even though it is conducted by the most competent economic managers, and that it most closely resembles the work of a commodity exchange with different ways of concluding deals.

The 1990 article describes how the system adapted to the shortage of management resources. Cycles of “bottom-up” and “top-down” approval were supposed to be repeated until assignments and resources were fully balanced, but they were cut off earlier. Assignments were left without resource backing, failures at one enterprise undermined the programmes of its customers, and shortages spread along technological chains into “deficit zones”. The responses were subsistence production inside enterprises (their own foundries where there should be none), spontaneous exchanges outside the plan and a drive towards monopolization — to reduce the range of products that had to be planned.

Naishul separately examines attempts to automate planning. He considered the idea of simulating the market through computer calculations unworkable if only because the scale of the task exceeds the capabilities of any conceivable machines, and he cited Yu. M. Rodny's unproven hypothesis that the plan of a very complex economy cannot, in principle, be reduced to an algorithm. The course towards automated management systems in the 1970s, in his assessment, could not solve the problem in the USSR of the time, and even if successful would not have noticeably improved the situation, because planning tasks are informal. The names of Glushkov and OGAS do not appear in the texts by Naishul that we have read; the view that his critique applies to the same group of projects is our own comparison, not his words.

## What worked and what did not

As an explanatory model, the theory of the administrative market has proved robust. It shows why resolutions of the Central Committee and the Council of Ministers were “absorbed” by the system, why, although there were victims, no culprits could be found, and why reforms that contradicted the logic of bargaining produced a surge of imbalances. Naishul analyses three types of such reforms. Creating a new hierarchy for a specific problem made that problem easier to solve but slowed down all the others — like the regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy) of 1957, which simplified links within a region and worsened all the rest. The endless search for an ideal system of indicators broke the links between suppliers and customers. And “economic methods” — the 1965 reform and the self-financing (khozraschyot) of perestroika — gave enterprises freedom from their customers without creating any new coordination.

He sees the causes of the collapse in a combination of several processes. From the 1950s and 1960s the technological paradigm changed: large homogeneous industries gave way to electronics and chemicals with an enormous range of products that could not be coordinated through agreements, and which could not be bought wholesale from the West under the conditions of the Cold War. The gap between the need for coordination and the resource of management grew continuously. Finally, prolonged bargaining corrupted the bureaucracy itself: instead of the “soldier of the party” there appeared the “trader of the party”, statuses began to be sold and lost their connection with people's real qualities. In a 2002 interview Naishul put it more harshly: the state itself was bartered away through communist barter.

Naishul's practical proposals were implemented only partially and not in the form he had in mind. The idea of dividing state property through personal money in Another Life resembles, in form, the voucher privatization of the 1990s, but in an interview with Russkaya Liniya (2002) Naishul himself said that he had opposed the voucher scheme in that form: he had devised it for the Brezhnev economy, but by the early 1990s the nomenklatura had already grabbed the property, and the state had become so weak that it could not supervise the exchange of vouchers for real assets. The sector-by-sector reform of 1988 with centralized auctions, in his words in the 1990 article, came too late: it should have been proposed no later than 1987–1988, but it could only be published in 1989.

Naishul's main forecast about the nature of the system was confirmed in his own later assessment. In the interview with Neprikosnovenny Zapas (2007) he says that the system worked inefficiently but did work, even though no one had designed it, and that after 1991 capitalism never actually arrived in the country — what happened instead was the “monetization” of the administrative market. In other words, bargaining between agencies and statuses did not disappear but began to be conducted for money.

## Debate and criticism

Naishul's first opponent was the official and Sovietological picture of the “administrative-command system”, in which the plan is handed down from above and those who carry it out obey. Naishul, like Kordonsky, regarded it as a description of an ideal rather than of reality. From the side of the advocates of optimal planning, the natural objection is that the failure of automation does not prove that a plan cannot be calculated: Naishul himself admits that the hypothesis that the plan cannot be reduced to an algorithm is unproven, and he relies primarily on an institutional argument — bargaining absorbs any new procedure.

It is important to see where Naishul's views are more radical than they seem at a quick reading. From his diagnosis of the “bureaucratic market” he drew the conclusion not that planning should be improved, but that this market should be entirely replaced by a commodity-money market: privatization of all state productive property, abolition of regulatory restrictions on economic activity, elimination of all bodies of administrative management of enterprises, and abandonment of labour legislation in favour of agreements between employers and employees. In the NZ interview (2007) he repeats that a smooth transition from this system is impossible: the transition to the market can only be abrupt, by large sectors and all at once. Many economists and politicians disagreed with this programme, and its social cost remains a matter of debate.

His assessment of privatization is also contested. Naishul believed that privatization had in fact begun long before the reforms — with the de facto assignment of flats to their occupants and spontaneous appropriation by the nomenklatura — and that managers should be openly rewarded with a share of property in order to preserve continuity: in The Sufferings of Privatization (Stradaniya privatizatsii, 1990) he recalls that he had proposed giving them 20 %, and warns that under spontaneous privatization the nomenklatura would take half. Critics saw such a position as legitimizing an unjust distribution. Kordonsky, co-author of the theory of the administrative market, in Administrative Markets of the USSR and Russia (Administrativnye rynki SSSR i Rossii) restates Naishul's idea that property had already been distributed under Soviet rule, and considers voucher privatization inefficient precisely because it violated obvious relations of possession.

Naishul's later views provoke a separate debate. In interviews of 2002 and 2004 he speaks about the cultural foundations of the economy, about the need for a strong state built on duty, obligation and honour, and about basing reforms on national traditions. To supporters of the liberal model of the 1990s this turn seemed a retreat from economics; to advocates of a strong state it seemed a belated admission. This part of his legacy is harder to verify against the original texts: the programmatic work On the Norms of Modern Russian Statehood (O normakh sovremennoy rossiyskoy gosudarstvennosti; the newspaper Segodnya, 1996) is available to us only as a title, and we have not read the texts of his lectures on the Russian political language.

## Legacy today

The theory of the administrative market has become a common language among economists and sociologists for describing the late Soviet economy. It is used both by those who agree with Naishul's liberal conclusions and by those who dispute them: even if one does not accept the programme of full privatization, it is hard to deny the observation that the outcome of Soviet planning was the result of bargaining between participants with different information and different weight. This is exactly how Shironin (EKO, 2020), citing Naishul, sums up the conclusions of this school: what looked like the result of planning was the outcome of non-monetized bargaining.

For the history of planning, Naishul is valuable because he connects two lines that are usually considered separately. The first is the question of whether a plan can be computed, which was at the heart of the debate between Mises, Hayek and Lange and later of the work of the optimal planning school. The second is the question of institutions: who supplies the planner with information and on what terms, who can block a decision, who is responsible for failure. Naishul shows that the second problem arises before the first: bargaining distorts requests and reports long before the matter reaches the calculation stage.

His description is consistent with what is already known about Soviet practice: informal exchange and the tolkachi (“pushers”, supply expediters) bridged the gap between an item of the plan and a specific product, and automation projects ran up against the interests of agencies. Naishul offers a single explanation for this — the limited resource of management and the veto held by every participant in the approval process. Also valuable is his warning about transitions: a reform that partially destroys the old coordination without creating a new one can be worse than both the old system and a consistent market.

Finally, the thesis about the “monetization” of the administrative market remains a working hypothesis for analysing contemporary governance: bargaining over statuses, quotas and exemptions from rules may persist even after money, contracts and digital procedures appear. For any project that introduces auctions, contracts and measurement, this observation becomes a test question: is the old bargaining being carried over into new forms? Naishul himself did not leave an answer to this question in the form of a ready-made procedure — he described the disease more precisely than the cure.

## Naishul and Open Planning: key differences and the best solutions

Naishul's most direct lesson concerns how approvals are structured. In the “economy of agreements” the same body takes part in setting the goal, allocating resources, carrying out the work and reporting on its completion, and every participant holds a veto whose price depends on its weight. The three circuits of Open Planning and the rule “those who set goals do not execute, those who execute do not verify” are designed to break precisely this bundle: the agency that allocates a resource cannot itself confirm that the resource has been used. But it must be honestly admitted that the separation rule does not by itself abolish bargaining. Naishul shows that bargaining arises wherever a decision has to suit many parties, so what matters to us is not only roles but also publicity: decisions on goals recorded in the event log, and open objections instead of a tacit veto.

The second difference lies in the method of allocation. In Naishul's account, the resource goes to whoever bargains better: ministries make fulfilment of assignments conditional on supplies, hide reserves, and after approval the plan is rewritten to match actual results. Quota auctions and payment only for a verified result are designed to replace bargaining with price and measurement. Interestingly, Naishul himself proposed a similar mechanism as early as 1988: in Problems of Creating a Market in the USSR (Problemy sozdaniya rynka v SSSR), planning bodies were to sell and buy the output of reformed sectors at centralized auctions at competitive prices. This is a direct forerunner of auctions, but with an essential difference: for him auctions were a transitional measure on the way to full privatization, whereas for us an auction is a permanent instrument within a publicly set framework.

Naishul's scepticism about computer planning coincides with our thesis that “tools are secondary”, but not entirely. He believed that the computer would not save the plan because planning tasks are informal and bargaining absorbs any procedure. We argue that the logic of the circuits works even without blockchain, AI and telemetry, and that tools merely make measurement cheaper. The shared conclusion — do not start with computing power — is the same. The divergence lies elsewhere: Naishul saw no place for the plan at all outside the transition period, whereas we retain the plan as a framework.

This divergence is clearly visible in the case of the “management bottleneck”. According to Naishul, the centre is overwhelmed because decisions about children's building blocks and sundresses pass through it. Our boundary of the plan — “the plan applies where decisions are long-term, capital-intensive and network-based” — responds to the same problem: everything else is allocated by the market, and the centre does not need to know the range of products. Naishul, however, would most likely object that the boundary would become blurred: every agency would try to declare its sphere “network-based and capital-intensive” in order to gain the right to allocate. This means that the boundary of the plan itself must be set publicly and revised on the basis of facts, not agencies' requests.

There is also a fundamental limit for the contractual model. Naishul insisted that the state, unlike the economy, must rest on duty, obligation and honour rather than on bargaining: a court, a verdict and the execution of a verdict cannot be objects of exchange. For Open Planning this means that contracts, quotas and payments apply to execution but not to verification or to rules: the measurement report, the version of the methodology and the decision on a goal must not be sold or exchanged. This coincides with our idea that rules must not be changed retroactively and with our refusal to use metrics in care, education, medicine, culture and science, but Naishul draws the line more strictly — as a question of the state's morality, not merely of incentive design.

The main risk that Naishul helps us see is the “monetization” of the administrative market. After 1991, in his assessment, bargaining did not disappear but became monetary. If in our model bargaining over resources turns into auctions while verification remains in the hands of agencies, we get exactly this scenario: formally market-based allocation combined with the old right of the strong participant to confirm its own result. That is why the verification circuit is for us not an add-on but a precondition: without an external measurement report and the two-column rule, quota auctions risk becoming a new form of the old bargaining.

## What open planning takes

- +The description of bargaining as a working risk model: when designing each procedure, ask who acquires a tacit veto and what it can be “bought” with. This fits into the goal-setting circuit and the event log, where objections must be recorded publicly.

- +Centralized auctions at competitive prices at the boundary between the planned and market sectors (the 1988 proposal) as a historical prototype of quota auctions. This fits into the execution circuit; from Naishul we take the idea of choosing boundaries so that the flows across them have a small range of products and are measurable.

- +The warning about the “management bottleneck”: the centre should not decide questions about the product range. This fits into the rule on the boundaries of the plan — the plan applies only where decisions are long-term, capital-intensive and network-based, and the boundary itself is approved publicly.

- +The lesson of partial reforms: the old coordination must not be destroyed before the new one is launched. This fits into the sequence of pilots — the execution circuit moves to auctions only after the registries and the measurement report are working.

- +Preliminary contracting for the transition period: participants conclude preliminary agreements before the new mechanism is launched. This fits into the obligations layer as a stage before a contract or quota enters into force.

- +The limit of bargaining: verification, methodology and rules cannot be objects of exchange. This fits into the separation rule and into the principle that rules are not changed retroactively.

## What we do not repeat

- −We do not repeat a plan that is rewritten after approval to match the facts, with reports referring to its latest version. In our model, recalculation is based on facts according to rules known in advance, and the version of the methodology is recorded as a legally significant artefact.

- −We do not hand verification to those who allocate or execute: in the system Naishul described, it was precisely the combination of these roles that made reports an object of bargaining. Payment without an external measurement report is impossible.

- −We do not hope that computing technology by itself will overcome institutional bargaining: Naishul showed that the 1970s course towards automation did not overcome it.

- −We do not adopt Naishul's 1990 programme wholesale — the elimination of all management bodies and the abandonment of labour legislation. It contradicts our model of public goal-setting and the limits on metrics in the social spheres.

## 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](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/graph)

- [Viktor Glushkov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/glushkov)Debate and criticism →Naishul held that the 1970s drive to automate planning would not overcome bargaining between agencies; the comparison with OGAS is made in the profile.

- [Evsei Liberman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/liberman)Debate and criticism →Naishul classes the 1965 reform among the “economic methods” that freed enterprises from the consumer without providing new coordination.

- [Simon Kordonsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kordonsky)Parallel path →Naishul’s Moscow group studied Gosplan, Kordonsky’s Novosibirsk group a rural district; both arrived at the theory of the administrative market.

- [Simon Kordonsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kordonsky)Debate and criticism ←Same diagnosis, different conclusions: Naishul expected a money market to replace the administrative one, Kordonsky sees monetisation as a change of form.

- [Leonid Kantorovich](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kantorovich)Debate and criticism →Naishul shows that bargaining distorts requests and reports before optimal calculation even begins.

- [Nikolai Fedorenko](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/fedorenko)Practice and institutions ←After an institute attached to Gosplan, Naishul worked from 1981 at TsEMI, headed by Fedorenko.

## Timeline

- 1949Born in Moscow

- 1971–1981Works at a research institute attached to the USSR Gosplan (according to his 2007 interview)

- 1979–1985Joint work with V. M. Konstantinov and Yu. M. Rodny on the technology of planned management

- 1985Samizdat book Another Life (Drugaya zhizn') with a project for dividing property through personal money

- 1986TsEMI preprint The Technology of Planned Management (Tekhnologiya planovogo upravleniya), with V. M. Konstantinov

- 1988Problems of Creating a Market in the USSR (Problemy sozdaniya rynka v SSSR), with a sector-by-sector reform and centralized auctions (published in 1989)

- 1990The Highest and Final Stage of Socialism (Vysshaya i poslednyaya stadiya sotsializma) and The Sufferings of Privatization (Stradaniya privatizatsii)

- 1996On the Norms of Modern Russian Statehood (O normakh sovremennoy rossiyskoy gosudarstvennosti) in the newspaper Segodnya

- 2007Interview with Neprikosnovenny Zapas: after 1991 the administrative market was “monetized”

## Key works

- 1985 Another Life (Drugaya zhizn'), samizdat

- 1986 The Technology of Planned Management (Tekhnologiya planovogo upravleniya), with V. M. Konstantinov, preprint of TsEMI, USSR Academy of Sciences

- 1989 Problems of Creating a Market in the USSR (Problemy sozdaniya rynka v SSSR) // Understanding (Postizhenie). Moscow: Progress

- 1990 Can the Soviet Economy Remain More Socialist than the American One? (Smozhet li sovetskaya ekonomika ostat'sya bolee sotsialisticheskoy, chem amerikanskaya) // Five Years of Perestroika (Pyat' let perestroyki). Moscow: Progress

- 1990 The Sufferings of Privatization (Stradaniya privatizatsii)

- 1991 The Highest and Final Stage of Socialism (Vysshaya i poslednyaya stadiya sotsializma) // Sinking into the Quagmire: Anatomy of Stagnation (Pogruzhenie v tryasinu. Anatomiya zastoya). Moscow: Progress

- 1996 On the Norms of Modern Russian Statehood: Formulating the Problems (O normakh sovremennoy rossiyskoy gosudarstvennosti (postanovki problem)) // Segodnya

## Sources

- В. А. Найшуль. [Высшая и последняя стадия социализма](http://libertarium.ru/l_libnaul_brezhnev). 1990

- В. А. Найшуль. [Другая жизнь](https://libertarium.ru/l_libnaulotfe.html). 1985

- В. А. Найшуль. [Проблемы создания рынка в СССР](https://libertarium.ru/l_libnayhul_mkt.html). 1989

- В. А. Найшуль. [Страдания приватизации](https://libertarium.ru/l_libnaul_torpriv.html). 1990

- беседовал А. Захаров. [Экономика развитого социализма: административный рынок, застой и нефть. Интервью с Виталием Найшулем](https://magazines.gorky.media/nz/2007/2/ekonomika-razvitogo-soczializma-administrativnyj-rynok-zastoj-i-neft.html). 2007

- В. М. Широнин. [Бюрократы, большевики и реформаторы: нетривиальная история экономического знания в России](https://ecotrends.ru/index.php/eco/article/view/4073). 2020

- С. Г. Кордонский. [Административные рынки СССР и России](https://www.hse.ru/data/550/136/1240/%D0%90%D0%B4%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5%20%D1%80%D1%8B%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B8%20%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A0%20%D0%B8%20%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8.pdf). 2006

- А. Колесников. [Змеиная горка: группа учёных становится командой реформаторов](https://www.vestnik-evropy.ru/issues/zmeinaya-gorka-predystoriya-reform.html). 2021

- А. Шуман. [Административные рынки в Беларуси](https://nmn.media/articles/3242). 2011

- Д. Быков. [Мы разучились побеждать. Интервью с Виталием Найшулем](https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2293432). 2004

- А. П. Никонов. [Виталий Найшуль: ни в одной православной стране нет нормальной экономики](https://ruskline.ru/monitoring_smi/2002/04/04/vitalij_najshul_ni_v_odnoj_pravoslavnoj_strane_net_normal_noj_e_konomiki). 2002

- Википедия. [Найшуль, Виталий Аркадьевич](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Найшуль,_Виталий_Аркадьевич). 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.

Contents

- [Who he is and his times](#context)

- [Main ideas](#ideas)

- [What became of the ideas in practice](#gosplan)

- [What worked and what did not](#worked)

- [Debate and criticism](#critique)

- [Legacy today](#legacy)

- [Naishul and Open Planning: key differences and the best solutions](#open-planning)

- [What open planning takes](#take)

- [What we do not repeat](#avoid)

- [Links between ideas](#links)

- [Timeline](#timeline)

- [Sources](#sources)

All profiles

Founders

- [Gleb Krzhizhanovsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/krzhizhanovsky)

- [Stanislav Strumilin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/strumilin)

- [Vladimir Bazarov and Vladimir Groman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bazarov-groman)

- [Nikolai Kondratiev](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kondratiev)

Industrialisation

- [Yevgeni Preobrazhensky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/preobrazhensky)

- [Nikolai Bukharin](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/bukharin)

- [Nikolai Voznesensky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/voznesensky)

Balances and optimal planning

- [Wassily Leontief](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/leontief)

- [Leonid Kantorovich](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kantorovich)

- [Viktor Novozhilov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/novozhilov)

- [Vasily Nemchinov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/nemchinov)

- [Nikolai Fedorenko](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/fedorenko)

Cybernetics and reforms

- [Viktor Glushkov](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/glushkov)

- [Evsei Liberman](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/liberman)

- [Stafford Beer](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/beer)

- [Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/cockshott)

Critics

- [Ludwig von Mises](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/mises)

- [Friedrich Hayek](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/hayek)

- [Oskar Lange](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/lange)

- [János Kornai](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kornai)

The administrative market

- [Vitaly Naishul](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/naishul)

- [Simon Kordonsky](https://gosplan2.ru/en/history/kordonsky)

## Related profiles

Simon Kordonsky

b. 1944 · Sociologist, one of the authors of the theory of the administrative market, author of the concepts of the resource state and the estate structure of post-Soviet Russia, tenured professor at the HSE University

János Kornai

1928–2021 · Hungarian economist, researcher of the socialist system and transition economies, author of the concepts of the “economics of shortage” and “soft budget constraints”, professor at Harvard University

Viktor Glushkov

1923–1982 · Mathematician and cyberneticist, founder and director of the Institute of Cybernetics of the Ukrainian SSR Academy of Sciences, author of the project for the National Automated System for Computation and Information Processing (OGAS) to manage the economy

Leonid Kantorovich

1912–1986 · Mathematician, creator of linear programming and of the theory of objectively determined valuations, winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Economics

Evsei Liberman

1897–1981 · Economist, professor at Kharkiv University, author of the article “Plan, Profit, Bonus” (1962), whose ideas formed the basis of the 1965 economic reform

Friedrich Hayek

1899–1992 · Austrian and British economist and philosopher, representative of the Austrian school, laureate of the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics