This paper attempts to examine the activities of the Soviet cooperative industry during the final stage of the Great Patriotic War, using documents from the extraordinary body of supreme authority in the country, the State Defense Committee (GKO). This objective is achieved by addressing intermediate tasks: highlighting key sectors of the cooperative industry that were involved in the production of military and other government-significant goods, examining selected resolutions of the GKO related to the key nomenclature for which industrial cooperatives were assigned tasks, as well as focusing on the assimilation with which state commissariats and departments the representatives of industrial cooperatives worked. Additionally, to provide further insights, the narrative includes descriptions of various types of ammunition produced by the cooperatives. The research methodology is based on a comprehensive approach to analyzing the military-industrial activities of the national economy complex, as proposed by the Soviet economist G.I. Shigalov. From a methodological standpoint, the article employs historical-descriptive, historical-comparative, and historical-genetic methods, incorporating elements of descriptive statistics. The novelty of this work lies in the use of previously overlooked documents from the GKO, archived in fund No. 644 of the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), as well as the reporting documentation of the Industrial Cooperatives Administration under the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR regarding the fulfillment of government special assignments, including GKO resolutions. Based on the conducted research, the author concludes that the cooperative industry of the RSFSR and the entire USSR was closely integrated into the national economy and military-industrial complexes, as it consistently fulfilled various assignments from the GKO, ranging from ammunition production—independently, with a full production cycle, and in cooperation with state industries—to supplying special clothing, tools, and raw materials to colleagues in other industrial commissariats and departments. At the same time, the issues of industrial cooperatives identified in previous research remained unchanged: the lack of raw materials, technical documentation, and technological conditions did not contribute to the normalization of cooperators' work in defense of the country.
Artur Ravilevich Khusnulin (Sun,) studied this question.