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Soviet Union [USSR] The Electronics Industry
Because of the drive for automation and modernization of
production processes, the electronics industry increasingly
supported many other industrial branches. Special emphasis was
given to improving cooperation between electronics plants and the
machine-building and metallurgy branches--a partnership severely
hindered in many cases by the industrial bureaucracy. In official
progress reports, all industries listed process automation and
robotization as standards for efficiency and expansion, and
conversion from manual processes has been a prime indicator of
progress in heavy industry. At the same time, government policy has
relied heavily on the electronics industry for televisions,
recording equipment, and radios for the consumer market. None of
those items came close to planned production quotas for 1987,
however.
Beginning in the 1970s, the most important role of the
electronics industry has been to supply lasers, optics, and
computers and to perform research and development on other advanced
equipment for weapons guidance, communications, and space systems.
The importance of electronics for civilian industry has led to
interministry research organizations that encourage the advanced
military design sector to share technology with its civilian
counterpart. Such an organization was called an interbranch
scientific-technical complex (mezhotraslevoi nauchnotekhnicheskii kompleks--MNTK). It united the research and
production organizations of several ministries and had broad
coordination control over the development of new technologies.
Because of the military uses of Soviet electronics, the West has
had incomplete specific data about it. In the early 1980s, an
estimated 40 percent of Soviet electronics research projects had
benefited substantially from the transfer of Western and Japanese
technology. In the late 1980s, however, Soviet electronics trailed
the West and Japan in most areas of applied electronics, although
circuit design and systems engineering programs were comparable.
The Soviet theoretical computer base was strong, but equipment and
programming were below Western standards. Problems have been
chronic in advanced fields such as ion implantation and
microelectronics testing. The branches designated by Soviet
planners as most critical in the 1980s were industrial robots and
manipulators, computerized control systems for industrial machines,
and semiconductors for computer circuits.
Data as of May 1989
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