ABSTRACT
Study of growth, balanced or unbalanced, development and dynamic equilibria are all the rage; and it is academically fashionable to conduct empirical studies of ‘underdevelopment’. The system of balances was a planning technique and its interest is mainly for specialists. A by-product of the campaign against the Bukharinite Right, which rose to a climax in the course of 1929, was a polemic against certain Gosplan economists, who had been associated with the advocacy of methods designed to import realism into planning and to purge it of ‘subjectivism’, and who were to become the unfortunate incidental casualties of the larger battle. Vladimir Groman had been largely responsible for the methodology of the series of annual Control Figures from 1925-6 onwards and of the perspective plans drafted in Gosplan to date; and he deserves credit for these distinguished pioneer contributions to planning techniques.
