to improve the quality and selection of services in larger centres and to homogenate service
quality on the lower level of hierarchy. According to recommendation of planners, special
emphasize was given to the local centres serving group of settlements and rajoon centres.
This means actually third rank or old local centres.
3.3. The reality of soviet comprehensive planning - non-integrated sector planning in
branch plant and collective farm settlements
The reality was something different, however. Despite planning economy doctrine, which
had very central role in the Soviet economy, comprehensive territorial planning and
especially CI planning was much weaker than in Western European, and particularly in
Nordic Countries. This is because of extreme centralisation and missing self-governance.
Soviet regime was applying extensive investment policy in order to utilize natural
or labour resources in rural areas. There was built a number of plants in small centres,
which were often subordinated to headquarters located in Tallinn or even in Moscow. In
one hand, this policy was rather positive in achieving regionally balanced growth. On the
other hand, administrations at the regional (rajoon) level had very limited opportunities to
speak with and coordinate.
As a consequence, soviet central and supposedly comprehensive planning created a
great number of so-called mono - functional, or “single enterprise settlements” around
mines, paper-mills, peat factories, saw mills, sewing plants and food industries. These
factories utilised local natural or human resources, but they were not integrated with their
hinterland when speaking about infrastructure and service development.
As there was a major lack of CI and living estates, every enterprise built own
housing, kindergartens, shops and schools. But the factory built CI was often not
considering the needs of surrounding territories and economies of scale within the
settlement. It was rather typical, that even small towns had 2-3 different retail, health care,
and kindergarten-school systems as by-products of a factory, a military site or a railway
centre. The last ones were in own turndirectly managed from Moscow or Tallinn.
As a result of the lack of coordination (planning), these settlements were even more
vulnerable than surrounding rural areas, because their absolute dependency of their main
employer, which was simultaneously also a service provider. Quite similar results gave
actually Western (and particularly Nordic) regional policy of the 1950s and 1960s:
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