GOST standards and technical specifications

The abbreviation GOST (rus) (SUST) (Eng.) stands for the State Union Standard. From its name we learn that most of the GOST standards of the Russian Federation came from the Soviet Union period. Creation and promotion of the Union Standards began in 1918 after introduction of the international systems of weights and measures.
The first body for standardization was created by the Council of Labor and Defense in 1925 and was named the Committee for Standardization. Its main objective was development and introduction of the Union standards GOST standards. The first GOST standards gave the requirements for iron and ferrous metals, selected sorts of wheat, and a number of consumer goods.
Until 1940 Narcomats (People’s Commissariats) had approved the standards. But in that year the Union Standardization Committee was founded and the standardization was redirected to creation of OST standards.
In 1968 the state system of standardization (SSS) as the first in the world practice. It included creation and development of the following standards:
– GOST – State Standard of the Soviet Union;
– RST— Republican standard;
– IST — Industrial Standard;
– STE — Standard of an Enterprise.
The level of technical development as well as the need for development and introduction of informational calculating systems and many other factors lead to creating complexes of standards and a number of large general technical standard systems. They are named inter-industrial standards. Within the state standard system they have their own indexes and the SSS has index 1. Nowadays the following standard systems (GOST standards) are valid:
– USCD — The Uniform System of Constructor Documentation (index 2);
– USTD — The Uniform System of Technological Documentation (3);
– SIBD — The System of Information-Bibliographical Documentation (7);
– SSM – The State System of Providing the Uniformity of Measuring(8);
– SSLS— The System of Standards of Labor Safety(12);
– USPD — The Uniform System of Program Documentation (19);
– SSERTE — the System of Standards of Ergonomic Requirements and Technical Esthetic (29).
The USCD and USTD systems take special place among other inter-industrial systems. They are interrelated and they formulate requirements for general technical documentation in all industries of economy.
The task of harmonization of Russia’s standards and the GOST standards was set in 1990 by the Soviet Council of Ministers at the beginning of the transit to market economy. At that time they formulated a direction that obeying the GOST standards may be obligatory or recommendable. The obligatory requirements are the ones that deal with safety, conformity of products, ecological friendliness and inter-changeability. The Act of the USSR Government permitted applying of national standards existing in other countries, international requirements if they meet the requirements of the people’s economy.
During the past years a large number of GOST standards were developed and approved. Nowadays there is a process of their revision so that they conform international standard requirements. As the base is the system of international standards ISO, in Russia they created series of Russian standards such as GOST ISO 9001 or GOST ISO 14001, which absorbed the best developments of the world community but they also consider the Russia’s specific.