Glasnost is a concept relating to openness and transparency. It has several general and specific meanings, including a policy of maximum openness in the activities of state institutions and freedom of information and the inadmissibility of hushing up problems. In Russian the word 'гласность' has long been used to mean "openness" and "transparency". In the mid-1980s, it was popularised by Mikhail Gorbachev as a political slogan for increased government transparency in the Soviet Union within the framework of perestroika, and the calque of the word entered into English in the latter meaning.
Perestroika was a political reform movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) during the late 1980s widely associated with CPSU general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his glasnost policy reform. The literal meaning of perestroika is "restructuring", referring to the restructuring of the political and economic systems of the Soviet Union, in an attempt to end the Era of Stagnation.
The five-year plans for the development of the national economy of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) consisted of a series of nationwide centralized economic plans in the Soviet Union, beginning in the late 1920s. The Soviet state planning committee Gosplan developed these plans based on the theory of the productive forces that formed part of the ideology of the Communist Party for development of the Soviet economy. Fulfilling the current plan became the watchword of Soviet bureaucracy.
Rationing is the controlled distribution of scarce resources, goods, services, or an artificial restriction of demand. Rationing controls the size of the ration, which is one's allowed portion of the resources being distributed on a particular day or at a particular time. There are many forms of rationing, although rationing by price is most prevalent.
In marketing, a coupon is a ticket or document that can be redeemed for a financial discount or rebate when purchasing a product.
Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin was a Soviet statesman during the Cold War. He served as the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1980 and was one of the most influential Soviet policymakers in the mid-1960s along with General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.
Austerity in Israel was the policy of austerity imposed in the State of Israel from 1949 to 1959. It included rationing and other emergency measures to weather the economic crisis in the early days of statehood.
Consumer goods in the Soviet Union were usually produced by a two-category industry. Group A was "heavy industry", which included all goods that serve as an input required for the production of some other, final good. Group B was "consumer goods", final goods used for consumption, which included food, clothing and shoes, housing, and such heavy-industry products as appliances and fuels that are used by individual consumers. From the early days of the Stalin era, Group A received top priority in economic planning and allocation so as to industrialize the Soviet Union from its previous agricultural economy.
Agriculture in the Soviet Union was mostly collectivized, with some limited cultivation of private plots. It is often viewed as one of the more inefficient sectors of the economy of the Soviet Union. A number of food taxes were introduced in the early Soviet period despite the Decree on Land that immediately followed the October Revolution. The forced collectivization and class war against "kulaks" under Stalinism greatly disrupted farm output in the 1920s and 1930s, contributing to the Soviet famine of 1932–33. A system of state and collective farms, known as sovkhozes and kolkhozes, respectively, placed the rural population in a system intended to be unprecedentedly productive and fair but which turned out to be chronically inefficient and lacking in fairness. Under the administrations of Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev, many reforms were enacted as attempts to defray the inefficiencies of the Stalinist agricultural system. However, Marxist–Leninist ideology did not allow for any substantial amount of market mechanism to coexist alongside central planning, so the private plot fraction of Soviet agriculture, which was its most productive, remained confined to a limited role. Throughout its later decades the Soviet Union never stopped using substantial portions of the precious metals mined each year in Siberia to pay for grain imports, which has been taken by various authors as an economic indicator showing that the country's agriculture was never as successful as it ought to have been. The real numbers, however, were treated as state secrets at the time, so accurate analysis of the sector's performance was limited outside the USSR and nearly impossible to assemble within its borders. However, Soviet citizens as consumers were familiar with the fact that foods, especially meats, were often noticeably scarce, to the point that not lack of money so much as lack of things to buy with it was the limiting factor in their standard of living.
Rationing was introduced temporarily by the British government several times during the 20th century, during and immediately after a war.
The ruble or rouble was the currency of the Soviet Union. It was introduced in 1922 and replaced the Imperial Russian ruble. One ruble was divided into 100 kopecks. Soviet banknotes and coins were produced by the Federal State Unitary Enterprise in Moscow and Leningrad.
The New Course was an economic policy that aimed to improve the standard of living, increase the availability of consumer goods in East Germany, lower the price of foodstuffs, small businesses and farms would be returned to the private sector.
The Soviet famine of 1946–1947 was a major famine in the Soviet Union that lasted from mid-1946 to the winter of 1947 to 1948.
Hyperinflation in early Soviet Russia connotes a seven-year period of uncontrollable spiraling inflation in the early Soviet Union, running from the earliest days of the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917 to the reestablishment of the gold standard with the introduction of the chervonets as part of the New Economic Policy. The inflationary crisis effectively ended in March 1924 with the introduction of the so-called "gold ruble" as the country's standard currency.
The New Economic Policy (NEP) was an economic policy of the Soviet Union proposed by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 as a temporary expedient. Lenin characterized the NEP in 1922 as an economic system that would include "a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control", while socialized state enterprises would operate on "a profit basis".
The economy of the Soviet Union was based on state ownership of the means of production, collective farming, and industrial manufacturing. An administrative-command system managed a distinctive form of central planning. The Soviet economy was characterized by state control of investment, prices, a dependence on natural resources, lack of consumer goods, little foreign trade, public ownership of industrial assets, macroeconomic stability, low unemployment and high job security.
The monetary reform in the Soviet Union of 1947 was carried out during December 16–19, 1947. It was the second Soviet monetary reform. At the same time the post-World War II rationing system was discontinued. The reform was a combination of redenomination and confiscation, the latter depending on the amount exchanged and whether the monies were kept at sberkassa or not. Amounts under 3,000 Rbls in private bank accounts were not revalued while cash had to be exchanged 10:1 for new roubles. State bonds were exchanged as well, under more favourable to government (politburo) rules of denomination. The confiscative character was attributed to large amounts of counterfeit money produced by Nazi Germany, as well as to the desire to devalue the savings of the profiteers and enrich the government.
The grain rationing system in China was imposed by the People's Republic of China in 1955 to control the production of food and to boost industrialization. People were given grain coupons with which they could buy a certain amount of grain at a low, state-imposed price, which varied somewhat with age, profession and location. Any quantity exceeding the coupon quota would have to be purchased at market price. Urban households in China therefore face a kinked budget constraint line. With this system, urban households were able to buy grain at a cheaper price, and at the same time rural areas, once they fulfilled the state-imposed quotas, were allowed to sell the excess supply at market price. The grain rationing system was abolished in November 1992.
Soviet-type economic planning (STP) is the specific model of centralized planning employed by Marxist–Leninist socialist states modeled on the economy of the Soviet Union (USSR).
Fartsovka is a slang term for the black market profiteering, illegal in the Soviet Union, that consisted in resale of goods manufactures abroad, which were hard to find and inaccessible to the average Soviet inhabitant. Clothing and fashion accessories were the overwhelming majority of supply and demand for fartsovka. Also popular were audio media, cosmetics, household items, and books. Fartsovka items, or the phenomenon itself, was generally called fartsa. The traders of this type were called fartsovshchiki.
