◉ PSYCHOHISTORY

Gosbank

nodeMoney & Finance
The bank that looked like a bank was actually the control room of the planned economy.
Who they are

Gosbank, the State Bank of the USSR, re-established on 3 October 1921 and starting operations on 16 November[1].

What they do

The record calls it the payments and clearing system for the Five-Year Plans.

How it works

By 1932, Gosbank provided 97% of all short-term credit. Its main job was running payments and clearing to match the Five-Year Plans. Transactions between enterprises, and between enterprises and the state, were carried out by moving deposits held at Gosbank. Planning targets were cleared against the bank's monitoring of plan fulfilment. The Party used the central bank, the Ministry of Finance and the central planning bureaucracy as a means of administrative control. The record does not establish that Gosbank issued orders to Gosplan or set the targets, and does not establish that the two were a single institution.

Why it matters

It shows how a bank can be presented as a bank while working as the accounting and control arm of a plan.

The engine's record — word for word
The corpus records: "By 1932, Gosbank provided 97% of all short-term credit, and its main job was running the payments and clearing system to match the Five-Year Plans 49 ." It is presented publicly as: "And Gosbank — the State Bank — was re-established on 3 October 1921 70 , beginning operations on 16 November." Documents named in the corpus: Five-Year Plans. Cross-sourced to brill.com, cbr.ru, elibrary.imf.org — documents cited by the corpus and retrieved independently of it.
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