Did a Soviet nail factory produce useless nails to improve metrics?

Question

We've all heard the story, which sounds for all the world like a typical urban legend. It goes something like this:

Once upon a time, there was a factory in the Soviet Union that made nails. Unfortunately, Moscow set quotas on their nail production, and they began working to meet the quotas as described, rather than doing anything useful. When they set quotas by quantity, they churned out hundreds of thousands of tiny, useless nails. When Moscow realized this was not useful and set a quota by weight instead, they started building big, heavy railroad spike-type nails that weighed a pound each.

The moral of the story, depending on who's telling it, is either "be careful what you measure for because it's often not representative of the result you really wanted," or "ha ha, look at how silly central planning of an economy is; we never had messes like that over here with Free Enterprise™." But it makes me wonder, did the Soviet Nail Factory ever truly exist?

Answer 1

Seems pretty clearly a joke grown into an urban legend.

See, e.g., this memoir by Pail Craig Roberts:

A famous Soviet cartoon depicted the manager of a nail factory being given the Order of Lenin for exceeding his tonnage. Two giant cranes were pictured holding up one giant nail.

The cartoon in question may be the one pictured here:

Click to enlarge. Image Source

Of course, the problem of which this is an exaggerated example was, indeed, real.