This article attempts to describe the activities of Soviet cooperative industry during the Great Patriotic War and to identify key features of this activity in relation to this sector of industrial development using materials from the State Defense Committee (GKO), the country's emergency authority during the war. To achieve this goal, as well as supporting objectives, documents from the GKO archives, deposited in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), as well as supporting archival materials from the Central City Archives of Moscow (TSGAM) and the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF), are utilized for scholarly discussion. This study utilizes historical descriptive and historical comparative methods, driven, firstly, by the current low level of research into Soviet industrial cooperation in the context of the history of the Great Patriotic War and, secondly, by the need to compare the relative importance of cooperative and state industries in fulfilling various government mandates. The study concludes that cooperative industry participated in a wide range of military-oriented tasks, owing to the difficult situation at the front and the lack of coordination within state industry during the initial stages of the war. This prompted the country's top leadership to engage industrial cooperative artels for the production of individual weapons and their components, military uniforms, fittings, equipment, and the provision of material and technical resources for economic and military-technical units. At the same time, a study of surviving reporting documentation of cooperative origin suggests a low level of production assignment fulfillment: less than 10% of all assignments assigned to industrial unions and industrial artels were fully completed, indicating the extreme weakness of the industrial cooperative system during the war and its heavy dependence on state support.
Artur Ravilevich Khusnulin (Thu,) studied this question.