Russian National Standards

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Russian national technical standards are developed under the auspices of the Russia's Federal Agency for Technical Regulation and Metrology (Rostekhregulirovaniye).

When a national standard is approved by a technical committee, it is assigned an acronym GOST R and a numeric designator, consisting of a serial number and a year the standard becomes effective. GOST R (Russian: ГОСТ Р) is an acronym for государственный стандарт России (gosudarstvennyy standart Rossii), which means state standard of Russia.

Historically, GOST R standards were created as a subset of the GOST standards originally developed by the government of the Soviet Union and later adopted by the CIS. This creates confusion among standards users who often refer to GOST standards as national standards of the Russian Federation. This however is a common misconception since the GOST standards are the official standards of the Euro-Asian Council for Standardization, Metrology and Certification, which is a regional standards organization headquartered in Minsk, the Republic of Belarus. Since Russia is the largest and most active contributor to the CIS standardization program, in many instances Russian standards are taken forward to the CIS, where they are adopted in whole or in part as regional standards. Thus, when adopted by the national standards bodies of the CIS member-states, the GOST standards are used across all CIS countries, including Russia. GOST R standards are implemented, unlike their regional cousins, at the national level within the Russian Federation only where they are de jure national standards.