Siberian urban and labour consumer cooperation in late 1920s-1935: from restoration to abolition

The place and the role of Siberian urban and labour consumer cooperation in providing the population with goods and services from the late 1920s to the middle of the 1930s is revealed in the article. During this period the cooperation passed the way full of significant changes: from being the first-rate supplier of goods and services in the cities and industrial regions to total abolition. Siberian urban and labour consumer cooperation during the new economic policy period (1921-1929) changed into a powerful social and economic organization, becoming the leader in supplying the population of cities and industrial centres with goods. Its role in developing catering and baking of bread, financing educational and common cultural activities, organizing children's institutions was significant as well. At the same time, switch to forced industrialization and conduct of the entire collectivization caused drastic change of the urban and labour cooperation position in Siberia, as well as in the country. Application of the planned basis in the activity of urban and labour consumer cooperation resulted in the situation when fundamental characteristics of its functioning were assigned by the state. It defined the amount of goods for cooperation, established prices for the production. Cooperation became an integral part of the system of state socialism, where public interests were a priority. Food crisis predetermined in 1928-1929 the general transfer of trade organizations to normalized and card supply, which kept back future development of retail trade, catering, warehousing and prevented from the mobilization of population's cash resources. The introduction of card system was accompanied with universal reorganization: in the beginning of 1930s the network of closed distribution centres attached to central labour cooperatives was founded, later it also included closed labour cooperatives. In some Siberian cities labour cooperatives confederated in urban unions of consumer societies in 1934-1935. All this happened against the constant growth in the first half of the 1930s of the specific gravity of state trade in the urban sector. Soviet state began to show preference in particular for it, whereas cooperative trade was subject to criticism, not always sound. The most severe and radical reorganization of urban and labour consumer cooperation occurred at the end of 1935 on the basis of the decree of the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) of September 29, 1935 ''On the activity of consumer cooperation in the countryside''. According to it all material and technical basis of consumer cooperation in cities was handed over free of charge to the state trade. Afterwards the consumer cooperation concentrated its activity in the countryside, having lost capacious urban market and the most well-to-do part of shareholders.

Keywords

Authors

References