# Talk:Ministry of Finance (Soviet Union)

I have a few random thoughts andquestions/suggestions for people working on this article and with access to the relevant sources:

From reading this article I could not understand what the relationship of the Ministry was with Gosbank of USSR. Did the Ministry formally oversee/control the bank? There is a sentence in the "Founding and early history" section which suggests that the answer is yes, but my feeling (admittedly uninformed) is that the Finance Ministry only controlled the State Bank of the USSR for a relatively short period, fairly early on.
The article says that the main function of the Ministry (presumably in the post New Economic Policy period) was to prepare and oversee the state budget of the USSR. However the meaning of a "state budget" in the USSR was completely different from the meaning that this term has in most western countries, and this point really needs to be explained. In the standard monetary economies "state budget" means state appropriations and state authorizations to various state agencies to spend money in particular way. This is probably what most readers unfamiliar with the Soviet system will assume.  However, in the Soviet Union the term "state budget" had a very different meaning. As far as I understand, the monetary system was divided into two largely disjoint parts: the cash system, mostly dealing with consumer goods and salaries, which involved physical currency; and the non-cash accounting system used by state enterprises in their own bookkeeping, and for recording transactions with other enterprises and the state. The state budget really dealt with this second, non-cash, system only. State planning was primarily done in physical quantities, and the state budgets played a passive and secondary role. Again, my understanding is that the non-cash accounting of state enterprises was used largely as a soft post-factum control mechanism by the state in order to ensure compliance with the state plans and to (try to) spot imbalances in resource allocation. The key point is that the actual movement of material goods between various enterprises and agencies was not really controlled by the availability of (non-cash) money, but rather primarily by the state plan(s). If the plan said so, goods and materials were transferred between various enterprises and agencies, whether or not non-cash money was technically available. Similarly, salaries were always paid, regardless of the current state of non-cash budget of a particular enterprise. I admit that this is based on personal knowledge (I grew up in the Soviet Union and got my undergraduate education there, before moving to the U.S. to pursue a graduate degree) rather than on inspecting sources and I may be mistaken on some points. Still, I think that these issues do need to be discussed in the article to some degree, so that it conveys accurate information about what the Finance Ministry was actually doing. Nsk92 (talk) 12:08, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
I'm working on it, may take some time to find out seeing that i don't know Russian that well, and because English-written sources rarely write about the MF. --TIAYN (talk) 22:33, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
I'm still working on it! --TIAYN (talk) 08:42, 28 December 2010 (UTC)