Economic Societies in the Cities of Tomsk Province in the Late 19th - Early 20th Centuries

The article deals with public associations, the purpose of which was to provide mutual financial support to their participants. The most active in the creation of economic organizations were representatives of the middle strata of the urban population - officials, employees, workers, artisans, and merchants of the cities. They created cooperatives, mutual insurance and mutual aid societies, and trade unions. The author aims to identify the level of social solidarity in the economic sphere in the Russian province on the example of Tomsk Province. The choice of the territory is explained by the fact that this is the only region in pre-revolutionary Russia that has a chronicle of public life, compiled by Professor O.A. Kharus and published in 2013. The chronicle takes into account Tomsk Province urban public organizations, which had the purpose of providing financial support to their founders and members. The author pays regard to the facts of their creation and functioning according to the information of state departments, periodicals, documents of the organizations themselves, memoirs of participants of the social movement. Legal and illegal organizations, statutory and non-statutory organizations were analyzed. The statistics include organizations from the moment of occurrence (organizational meeting). When compiling the chronicle of the social life of Tomsk Province, Professor Kharus employed the method of compiling a chronicle and statistics of the workers' and social-democratic movement in Russia. The calculation includes the results of research of recent years. The Chronicle of the Public Life of Tomsk Province, compiled by the author of the article and Professor Kharus, included 151 organizations. The article analyzes a more complete version of the chronicle - 167 organizations. The author divides the process of organizing economic communities in Tomsk Province into three periods: (1) 1860-1904: the creation of cash registers and mutual aid societies, consumer societies by employees of Cabinet enterprises and state institutions, trade establishments and printing houses; (2) the period of the First Russian Revolution: trade union construction by workers and employees of state and private institutions and enterprises; (3) the inter-revolutionary period: the cooperative movement in cities and workers' settlements. Of the 167 registered organizations, 18 were workers' production cooperatives, 45 were cash registers and mutual aid societies, 46 were consumer societies, 5 were credit partnerships, 3 were insurance partnerships, and 48 were legal and illegal trade unions of workers and employees. The provincial city Tomsk had 59 of them, the mining center Barnaul had 34, the growing commercial and industrial Novonikolaevsk had 16. The author comes to the conclusion that the organization of economic societies was part of the process of the formation of a civil society and the creation in the cities of the province of the middle urban strata.

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