Unexpected for ruling circles was reaction to this decision...

Unexpected for ruling circles was reaction to this decision as a movement of scientists and students under slogan of “scientific and technical forecasting”, i.e. forecasting in the sphere of science and industries only, not of society in general, no confrontation against “scientific communism” (please, not to confuse with technological forecasting !).

After three years of fierce ideological struggle with Marxist dogmatics, there was appeared in the USSR by the end of 60s around a thousand (!) of sectors and departments in research institutes, big plants, government establishments, which were engaged in technological forecasting not only in the sphere of science and industries.

Spontaneously there were appeared some non-government associations with own magazines beginning to organise almost annual congresses “on forecasting” with more then a thousand participants everyone. Almost each month in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Novosibirsk and others USSR university centres there passed conferences, symposiums, colloquiums, seminars on this problematic with dozens and hundreds participants everyone.

In this movement, according its leaders was involved not less than 4000 active participants (more than 800 in Moscow only) and ten times as much of students and other auditory. Every year left on this problematic up to a dozen books, some dozens articles, some hundreds papers. There was published even an independent non-government (strictly forbidden in the USSR!) monthly review “Voprosy prognozirovania” (‘Problems of Forecasting”): 14 issues before repression.

In 1966-91 there was published in the USSR over 500 of “scientific monographs on forecasting” only, not considering thousands reports on futures studies and publicistications. As a matter of fact it was as much as continuation of forecasting boom of 60s in the West, but with the Soviet specificity. Two third of all these departments and publications were that of forecasting in science and engineering (mostly the last), near a quarter - in economics, near one tenth - in sphere of town-planning.

Other branches of forecasting - concerning environment and health, sociology and politology, population and culture, psychology and law, space and war, etc. - made shares of one percent everyone. A special cluster of forecasting was that in natural sciences: agro-, hydro-, weather forecasts, in geology and mineralogy, in physics and chemistry, in medicine and biology, in cosmology etc.