All this huge economy, producing huge amounts of oil, gas, coal, steel, cast iron (!), electricity, building huge amounts of submarines, missiles of all kinds, tanks, nuclear reactors, airplanes, diesel locomotives, hydraulic turbines, heavy presses - all this huge, unbalanceable and unbelievably huge economy. It relied on informal relationships that replaced at least half a dozen formal national systems of management and planning.
(The Council of Ministers paid less and less attention to the State Planning Committee; the line ministries - to the decisions of the Council of Ministers; the "Kremlin Eight" - eight engineering ministries united in the Military-Industrial Committee with a residence in the Senate Palace in the Kremlin - lived by its rules; the State Supply Committee lived by the regional rules and the holdings of its powerful republic; on themselves; the Central Committee Secretariat tried to fulfill the functions of the supreme controller, but little was left of the previous authority, and the secretariat became an arbitrator, another player in a complex bureaucratic game. connected to each other).
The real power in the economy was gradually captured by the "red directors", interacting with each other according to the principle "you give me - I give you".
In Brezhnev's last years, this system continued to move in inertia. But the attempt to "accelerate", "establish a socialist order" and a huge increase in capital investments, carried out by Gorbachev immediately after he came to power (even before the announcement of perestroika) and was a continuation of Andropov's "improvement of socialism", started powerful destructive processes.