Gosplan or State Planning Committee (Russian: Госпла́н, Russian pronunciation: [ɡɐsˈplan]) was the committee responsible for economic planning in the Soviet Union. The word "Gosplan" is an abbreviation for Gosudarstvenniy Komitet po Planirovaniyu (Russian: Государственный комитет по планированию, State Committee for Planning). One of its main duties was the creation of Five-Year Plans.

The agency was formed on 22 February 1921 as the "RSFSR State Planning Commission", by decree of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic's Sovnarkom. The GOELRO plan, the first large-scale Soviet plan to recover the Russian economy, was first to test Gosplan. After the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR State Planning Commission of the USSR Council of Labour and Defence (СТО СССР, Совет Труда и Обороны СССР) was established on 21 August 1923. The abbreviation "Gosplan" has been used since 1921.

Initially Gosplan had an advisory function. Its primary objective was the co-ordination of the economic plans of Union republics and the creation of the common Union plan. During 1925 Gosplan started creating annual economic plans, known as "control numbers" (контрольные цифры).

Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov (Russian: Константин Степанович Мельников; August 3 [O.S. July 22] 1890, Moscow - November 28, 1974, id.) was a Russian architect and painter. His architectural work, compressed into a single decade (1923–1933), placed Melnikov on the front end of 1920s avant-garde architecture. Although associated with the Constructivists, Melnikov was an independent artist, not bound by the rules of a particular style or artistic group. In 1930s, Melnikov refused to conform with the rising stalinist architecture, withdrew from practice and worked as a portrait painter and teacher until the end of his life.

Konstantin Melnikov was born a fourth child in a family and was a vegetarian. His father, Stepan Illarionovich Melnikov, originally from Nizhny Novgorod region, was a road maintenance foreman, employed by the Moscow Agricultural Academy. Mother, Yelena Grigorievna (née Repkina), came from the peasants of Zvenigorod district. The whole family occupied a single room of a state-managed working class barrack in Hay Lodge (Соломенная Сторожка), then a quiet northern suburb of Moscow. Melnikovs tried hard to rise above bitter poverty, to return to farming and eventually relocated to their own small house and set their own dairy farm. Konstantin Melnikov later praised his father, who noticed little boy's addiction to drawing and regularly brought him scrap paper for drawing from the Academy. However, all the education they could afford was a two-year parish school (completed in 1903).

Yuri Feodorovich Orlov (Russian: Юрий Фёдорович Орлов, born August 13, 1924) is Professor of Physics and Government at Cornell University, a prominent nuclear physicist, a former Soviet dissident, and a human rights activist.

During his childhood, in the 1930s, Orlov witnessed the destruction of his home village by Stalinist collectivisation in the USSR.

After World War II he worked at the Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics, from which he was fired in 1956 for his human rights activism. He was sent into "soft exile" in Armenia, where in the early 1970s he led Particle accelerator projects at the Yerevan Physics Institute.

Upon his return to Moscow in 1973 he worked at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism and Propagation of Radio Waves in suburban Troitsk, whilst at the same time publicly supporting Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In 1976, to the further displeasure of the authorities, he founded the Moscow Helsinki Group to monitor Soviet adherence to the 1975 Helsinki human rights accords.

Making music on the fringe since the underground movement ignited in Russia in the beginning 1980s, Alexei Borisov has developed an impressively diverse body of work as a member of NIGHT PROSPEKT, F.R.U.I.T.S. and VOLGA, among many other projects.

Born in Moscow on December 7, 1960, Alexei Borisov graduated the Moscow State University where he had studied History and Arts. His controversial performing career (as a guitarist) began in the CENTER new-wave group, in 1980. Next year, he formed the PROSPEKT mod-band. And re-loaded it in 1985 as the shifting NIGHT PROSPEKT with then-partner Ivan Sokolovsky. After the actual dissolution of the band in the beginning 1990s, he surfaced then in the "noise reconstruction and techno acoustics" duo F.R.U.I.T.S. with Pavel Zhagun (also known as PIEZO) and in various short-lived art/noise/industrial acts like JOINT COMMITTEE, ATOMIC BISQUIT ORCHESTRA and SEVER.

Being left with little possibility of finding a label to fund and promote his most radical projects, Alexei Borisov with his old-associate, an experimental Finnish sound-sculptor Anton Nikkila established in 2000 their own N&B Research Digest label.