I’ve repeatedly seen the word “design bureau” used in texts to refer to a company or organisation in the Soviet Union or its successor states that developed a particular technology. Example industries include aircraft (Mikoyan-Gurevich, Antonov, Tupolev), spacecraft (Korolev) or nuclear reactors (Gidropress).
I’ve never seen the term “design bureau” used in this sense in a Western context; taking the aviation example, I suppose the Western analog of MiG or Tupolev would be corporations like Boeing or Lockheed Martin, which would simply be called aircraft manufacturers rather than design bureaus. So I’m wondering what’s behind this term. It sounds to me as if the Soviets distinguished between the development of a technology and its subsequent mass production; the design bureau would do the R&D, but once that’s done other companies would manufacture the product according to the designers’ blueprints. Is this really how the technology sector, especially in aerospace and defence, was structured in the Soviet Union (and possibly still is in Russia)?
That’s exactly how it worked. Design Bureaus (in Russian - Opytno-Konstruktorskoe Byuro or OKBs) focused on research, engineering, and testing. They were numbered (OKB-122, OKB-11, etc) and assigned to specialties, but the bigger ones were often called by their chief designers - Andrei Tupolev, Artem Mikoyan, Mikhail Gurevich, etc. Thew actual manufacturing was carried out by manufacturing plants. For example the MiG-21 was built in GAZ-21 (State Aviation Plant #21) in Gorky, MMZ (State Aviation Plant #30) in Moscow, and TAZ-31 (State Aviation Plant #31) in Tbilisi.
In Post-Soviet Union Russia, these were eventually merged into several mega corporations like UAC and Rostec that handle both design an manufacturing. Out of tradition and “name brand recognition” they still use the old names like Tupolev, MiG, Sukhoi, etc.
The same thing happened in the USA when production needs were high & rushed, like in WWII. For example, the B-17 bomber was designed by the Boeing R&D Department, but then was built by Lockheed, Douglas, and Boeing itself.
The US Defense Department does that now: they often split a new weapon into separate contracts for the design phase and then the production phase. And sometimes after the design part is done, the production part is split into multiple contracts with separate suppliers (the military gets competitive bids plus redundant sources).