GOST

CIS technical standards
the set of technical standards as a whole

GOST (ГОСТ) refers to a set of international technical standards maintained by the Euro Asian Council for Standardization, Metrology and Certification (EASC), a regional standards organization operating under the auspices of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). All sorts of regulated standards are included, with examples ranging from charting rules for design documentation to recipes and nutritional facts of Soviet era brand names. The latter have become generic, but may only be sold under the label if the technical standard is followed, or renamed if they are reformulated.

GOST standards were originally developed by the government of the Soviet Union as part of its national standardization strategy. The word GOST (Russian: ГОСТ) is an acronym for gosudarstvennyy standart (Russian: государственный стандарт), which means government standard. The history of national standards in the USSR can be traced back to 1925, when a government agency, later named Gosstandart, was established and put in charge of writing, updating, publishing, and disseminating the standards. After World War II, the national standardization program went through a major transformation. The first GOST standard, GOST 1 State Standardization System, was published in 1968.

After the disintegration of the USSR, the GOST standards acquired a new status of the regional standards. They are now administered by the Euro Asian Council for Standardization, Metrology and Certification (EASC), a standards organization chartered by the Commonwealth of Independent States. At present, the collection of GOST standards includes over 20,000 titles used extensively in conformity assessment activities in 12 countries. Serving as the regulatory basis for government and private sector certification programs throughout the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the GOST standards cover energy, oil and gas, environmental protection, construction, transportation, telecommunications, mining, food processing, and other industries. The following countries have adopted all or some of GOST standards in addition to their own, nationally developed standards: Russia, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia, and Turkmenistan. Because GOST standards are adopted by Russia, the largest and most influential member of the CIS, it is a common misconception to think of GOST standards as the national standards of Russia. They are not. Since the EASC, the organization responsible for the development and maintenance of the GOST standards, is recognized by ISO as a regional standards organization, the GOST standards are classified as the regional standards. The national standards of Russia are the GOST R standards. Ukraine scrapped its GOST (DSTU) standards in December 2015.

GOST R, or Russian certification system, is a subset of GOST standards that is valid only the territory of the Russian Federation, in contrast to the GOST standards, used across all CIS countries, including Russia. This system is aimed to ensure safety and quality of products and services and involves obligatory certification of certain goods, both produced locally and imported. List of products subject to obligatory certification is defined by the Russian Federal Technical Regulation and Metrology Agency. The very system of certification GOST R has been valid in Russia for many years. The main normative base for it was national standards. At the same time active policy of Russia towards entering the WTO was the reason for adopting the federal law no. 184 ФЗ "On Technical Regulation", designed to harmonise Russian technical regulations with European legislation.