Question: Has there ever a period in history when people were nice to each other and not killing each other?

In other words, since humans arrived, have the inhabitants of this planet ever enjoyed ***world peace***?

To answer this, we first have to define *period*. Let's define *period* as a minimum of 50 years. If there are any periods of time without records, we will have to ignore those periods.

Now let's define *not killing each other*. By this, I mean no known battles, wars, or genocides on planet earth. I'm not referring to individual acts of violence.

*As a curious side note, with over 5,000 questions asked on this StackExchange site, this is the first question to ever implement the [peace](/questions/tagged/peace "show questions tagged 'peace'") tag. Well... almost... I just realized that I don't have enough rep to create a new tag, so perhaps a moderator will be kind enough to add it.*

Answer: 
Economy was indeed centralized but not absolutely. This applies not only to airplanes but to cars and to many other items. There were usually more than one manufacturer. 

Speaking of the airplanes one has to distinguish the plants and design bureaus. There were really many airplane designers, and there was a severe competition between them. The state commission usually selected a model from
several models made by different designers. The winning model went in production on one of the state owned plants. The fight between various design bureaus
was very far from "honest competition". But I suppose that this situation satisfied the authorities: probably they understood that competition is good.
Same situation prevailed in the missile industry and in some other war-related sectors of economy.

Airplane design was a very prestigious occupation, and some design bureaus directors were relatives of Politbureau members (like Mikoyan and Kaganovich) or other people closely affiliated to the power structure (Yakovlev).
The reason for it is that "manufacturing airplanes" is misleading in terms of suggesting that it's like uniform activity regardless of plane category. It's not, manufacturing a bomber might very well require a different experience, skillset and tooling than manufacturing a fighter.

This is counter-intuitive, but joint programs can often induce greater costs per unit and type than separate programs taken together. For instance, Joint Strike Fighter would likely be significantly cheaper if ordered as three separate airplanes:

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CkGYn.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/CkGYn.jpg)

Source: "Do Joint Fighter Programs Save Money?" by RAND Corp (<http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/MG1200/MG1225/RAND_MG1225.pdf>)

Suppose you have One Big Soviet Airplane Factory that produces all the airplanes. According to findings cited above, it would make sense for it to have several separate divisions (definitely two for fighters and bombers, maybe a third one for tactical bombers, and what about marine aviation? how about piston-engine-powered basic training aircraft, does it make sense to manufacture them in the same division/facility as jet fighters? what about utility helicopters? what about anti-submarine warfare helicopters? how about wing-in-ground-effect ASW ekranoplan like Beriev VVA-14? <http://uk.businessinsider.com/soviet-unions-bartini-beriev-vva-14-plane-2015-1>). They likely would have to have their own specialized facilities.

What if those divisions were separate enterprises? The cost savings by lumping them all into one would not be great (save some on a few managers more + more than 1 HR, that's it), while likely a lot of value would be lost: different mindsets, better specialization, unique experience, different bosses and managers trying out different approaches to do stuff.

The Soviet theory to do this, that is, to separate design bureaus from fabrication facilities was actually optimum way to do it: have the best design first, then have it manufactured by the facility best suited for peculiarities of the job.

Economically speaking, it makes sense to merge only enterprises and facilities fulfilling both of the following conditions:

* they use very similar designs and manufacturing technology
* merger allows to realize economy of scale (falling marginal unit cost with growth of production volume)

It did not make sense for the Soviets to go beyond that.