The subject of the study is the activities of Soviet industrial cooperatives in Moscow during the post-war reconstruction period from 1945 to 1950. This time frame is chosen, on the one hand, due to the boundaries of the 4th five-year plan for the development of the national economy of the USSR and Moscow, and on the other, due to the peculiarities of the functioning of industrial cooperatives in the final stage of the Great Patriotic War. The aim of the work is to study the main aspects of this activity based on published operational documents and unpublished archival sources, which involves solving a number of auxiliary tasks, such as determining the role of industrial cooperatives in the five-year plan for the economic recovery of the capital compared to other sectors of industry, as well as identifying the results of production activities and describing the key characteristics and problems of this work. The research employs historical-descriptive and historical-comparative methods; the former brings previously overlooked information about metropolitan industrial cooperatives into circulation, while the latter facilitates the comparison of production dynamics indicators of key sectors of the urban economy of Moscow. The study utilizes documents from the Central City Archive of Moscow (CGAM) as well as published sources in the form of bulletins from the Moscow Council of Workers' Deputies. Based on the examined data, a conclusion is drawn about the consistently high production dynamics in the cooperative industry of the capital and about its higher growth rates compared to competitors from state light and local industry; at the same time, the activities of the artels of industrial cooperatives consistently became the subject of ridicule in satirical publications and scrutiny by the authorities, which was caused, on one hand, by the low quality of the products produced and the lack of any progress in addressing this issue, and on the other, by the consistently arising precedents of the emergence of fake cooperatives in the system.
Artur Ravilevich Khusnulin (Thu,) studied this question.