GOST

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GOST refers to a set of technical standards maintained by the Euro-Asian Council for Standardization, Metrology and Certification (EASC), a regional standards organization operating under the auspices of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

1 History
2 The present
3 Related standards
4 Examples
5 Notes
6 See also

[edit] History

Cover page of a GOST standard

GOST standards were originally developed by the government of the Soviet Union as part of its national standardization strategy. The word GOST (Russian: ГОСТ) is an acronym for gosudarstvennyy standart (Russian:государственный стандарт), which means state standard.

The history of national standards in the USSR can be traced back to 1925, when a government agency, later named Gosstandart, was established and put in charge of writing, updating, publishing, and disseminating the standards. After World War II, the national standardization program went through a major transformation, which provided the necessary methodological, logistical, and technological support for the long economic expansion that lasted into the early 1980s. The GOST standards, which were the cornerstone of the standardization reform, played a crucial role in standardizing and optimizing every facet of the design, production, and distribution of goods produced in the USSR. Virtually everything--from needles to shoes and from bicycles to intercontinental ballistic missiles--was mass-produced by government-owned enterprises in compliance with applicable - GOST standard. For example if an electronics factory produced a tape recorder, nearly every component in that tape recorder would have been manufactured according to a specific GOST standard. The greatest economic benefit of having a nationally enforced set of mandatory standards was the level of compatibility and, to some extent, interchangeability of domestically produced parts and components previously unachievable by any single nation.

The first GOST standard, GOST 1 State Standardization System, was published in 1968. Over the years, the collection of actively used GOST titles grew to over 30,000 documents in 1991, at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

While the total or near-total standardization of the national economy may have helped the Soviet Union become an industrial superpower, it also created problems, which the centrally planned Soviet economy was unable to fix. Although the GOST standards established uniform quality and safety requirements for the goods produced, the government's effort to use the standards as a tool of quality assurance had only limited success. The prescriptive nature of the GOST standards did not provide enough flexibility and did not encourage innovation and creativity. As a result, most manufacturers were unwilling to modernize their product lines or improve quality of their products, which for decades remained mediocre at best, most notably in such sectors as the consumer goods and housing construction.

[edit] The present

After the disintegration of the USSR, the GOST standards acquired a new status of the regional standards. They are now administered by the Euro-Asian Council for Standardization, Metrology and Certification (EASC), a standards organization chartered by the Commonwealth of Independent States.

At present, the collection of GOST standards includes over 20,000 titles used extensively in conformity assessment activities in 12 countries. Serving as the regulatory basis for government and private-sector certification programs throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States, the GOST standards cover energy, oil and gas, environmental protection, construction, transportation, telecommunications, mining, food processing, and other industries.

The following countries have adopted GOST standards in addition to their own, nationally developed standards:

- Russia
- Belarus
- Ukraine
- Moldova
- Kazakhstan
- Azerbaijan
- Armenia
- Kyrgyzstan
- Uzbekistan
- Tajikistan
- Georgia
- Turkmenistan
- Indonesia

Because GOST standards are adopted by Russia, the largest and most influential member of the CIS, it is a common misconception to think of GOST standards as the national standards of Russia. They are not. Since the EASC, the organization responsible for the development and maintenance of the GOST standards, is recognized by ISO as a regional standards organization, the GOST standards are classified as the regional standards. The national standards of Russia are the GOST R standards.