Industrial Production Associations

The industrial production association came into existence at a time when Nikita Khrushchev had destroyed the power of the central industrial ministries by replacing them with regional economic councils (sovnarkhozy ).^[28] In this policy climate one of the association's primary objectives became the integration of autonomous production units engaged in similar activities. Once the industrial ministries were reestablished in 1965, advocates of economic reforms, such as Premier Aleksei Kosygin and others, supported institutional arrangements that would enhance managerial coordination across ministerial boundaries.^[29] One such arrangement, the industrial production association (ob"edinenie ), formalized previously existing relationships by bringing under a single managerial hierarchy enterprises engaged in the manufacture of components through to finished products.

Industrial production associations eventually grew to encompass enterprises subordinate to a variety of institutional and geographic hierarchies. Their integrative capacity proved both an asset and an encumbrance. In an economic and political microclimate like Leningrad's, where development policies had been predicated on interbranch and interinstitutional cooperation, local managers encouraged this new organizational format. Elsewhere, however, associations were vulnerable

to the machinations of disgruntled and insecure ministerial officials seeking to maintain their own autonomy. Although the association format originated elsewhere, it gained an immediate foothold in Leningrad, perhaps because of a local capacity to coordinate innovation across various interinstitutional (e.g., ministerial) boundaries.

The first production association was organized in L'vov in 1961, linking several local light-industrial establishments under a single organizational format.^[30] A year later the same approach was used in Leningrad heavy industry. The first Leningrad production association combined four related enterprises into LOMO, the Leningrad Optico-Mechanical Association.^[31] Only three years after LOMO's creation some 130 local enterprises had been joined together into 30 similar production associations, a faster rate of consolidation than found in other Soviet industrial centers. LOMO has subsequently grown into one of the largest, most prestigious and powerful production establishments of its type currently operating in the Soviet Union. The movement to establish production associations continued in Leningrad for years afterwards. By 1978, the city's 210 associations accounted for 80 to 90 percent of all its industrial production as opposed to nearly half of national industrial output.^[32] The extent to which associations controlled local industry was unprecedented for the USSR, and remains so today.

To appreciate the singular success of production associations in Leningrad, we should recall that Kozlov's development strategy relied heavily on economic specialization and concentration, as well as technological innovation. By bringing scores of plants and factories under unified managerial systems, the associations enhanced the possibilities for both specialization and innovation planned from above. As smaller peripheral enterprises were absorbed by the new associations, the range of production activities changed markedly. A production shop that previously served a number of clients came to serve only one—its parent association. Possibilities for technological innovation could theoretically be exploited more efficiently as a relatively small number of conglomerates—the 200-odd associations—developed coordinated innovation plans for hundreds of production facilities.

This intense industrial centralization in Leningrad becomes ever more apparent at the level of the urban district (raion ). For example, by the 1980s, Evgenii Mikhailov, then first secretary of the city's important Vyborgskii District party committee, reported that just 13 industrial and scientific-production associations accounted for 80 percent of the area's total industrial production.^[33] Of those 13 associations, six had party committees with the full rights and responsibilities of district party committees, thereby presenting multiple challenges to the authority of Mikhailov's own district party committee (raikom ).^[34] To demonstrate that Vyborgskii was not an aberrant case, we note that 12

associations produced 90 percent of the industrial output of the Zhdanovskii District, 11 associations accounted for 80 percent of that of the Kirovskii District, and 10 produced 95 percent of that of the Leninskii District (all in 1980).^[35]