Appendix A. Consumer cooperatives: historiographical note

The challenge facing any historian interested in consumer cooperatives is to sift through the existing historiography. Much like the “workers’ movement,” the “cooperative movement” was a politically correct topic during the later decades of the USSR. It accordingly generated a mountain of scholarly literature; Iu. A. Il’in’s recent bibliography of works in Russian, Отечественная кооперация: библиографический указатель за 1925-1992 гг. (Ivanovo, 1994), runs to 471 pages. Much of this scholarship was driven by historiographical debates that are unlikely to generate interest today, e.g. Were cooperatives capitalist, socialist, or state capitalist in nature? What was the relationship between “elementary cooperatives” (i.e. consumer, credit, manufacturing, and agricultural cooperatives) and “advanced cooperatives” or “consumer-producer communes” (i.e. collective farms) in “Lenin’s cooperative plan”? As I note in my book, though, the Soviet-era scholarship worked through a prodigious amount of primary source material and reached a consensus on many important points, particularly with respect to political history of cooperatives from 1917 to 1930. Alongside the inevitable percentage of dross, there were several genuinely valuable studies in this corpus. They include V. V. Kabanov, Октябрьская революция и кооперация (Moscow, 1973); and see also his updated synthesis, Кооперация, революция, социализм (Moscow, 1996); L. F. Morozov, От кооперации буржуазной к кооперации социалистической (Moscow, 1969; L. E. Fain, Отечественная кооперация: исторический опыт (Ivanovo, 1994); and V. P. Dmitrenko, L. F. Morozov, and V. I Pogudin, Партия и кооперация (Moscow, 1978). Much earlier works, such as the 1928 edited collection Кооперация в СССР за 10 лет, also contain useful information.

My main purpose in including this bibliographical note is to alert readers to the problematic character of all quantitative estimates concerning consumer cooperatives in the early Soviet period. The Central Statistical Administration did not collect statistics on consumer cooperatives until September 1919, and even afterwards, the published statistics and statistical estimates are often contradictory. Kabanov has a discussion of this problem on pp. 210-11 of Октябрьская революция и кооперация, but he rather disappointingly does not confirm or dispute the reliability of the various estimates. The big question marks concern the following topics:

a) the number of consumer cooperatives during the first years of the revolution, say at the beginning of 1918. A commonly accepted figure for membership at that time is 11.5 million, but different historians place the number of consumer cooperatives anywhere between 23,000 and 35,000, without providing solid evidence.

b) the number of members in the later years of the civil war. At the end of 1920, the cooperative press claimed that cooperatives had a combined membership of 30 million, with a serviice reach (including members’ families) of 100 million people (70% of the population). Though often cited, this estimate was not justified at the time and has never been verified.

c) The size and distribution of the cooperative retail network in the 1920s. Here, the statistical manual published in 1959, Советская торговля. Статистический сборник, places the cooperative network at 29,900 shops in 1923-4; 79,300 in 1924-5; and 104,500 in 1925-6. This, however, is difficult to reconcile with the figures for different types of cooperatives offered by Makerova and the other contributors to Кооперация в СССР за 10 лет, which would seem to imply lower totals. Likewise, Komvnutorg (in GARF f. 5446, op. 55, d. 2228, ll. 85-7) was working with figures in 1923 that suggested a considerably higher proportion of rural stores (some 27,000, or 90%) than are compatible with the 19,900 rural state and cooperative shops listed on p. 140 of Советская торговля. Стат. сборник. Makerova, whose table on rural and urban shops in 1923-4 is clearly defective (she listed 2,327 urban cooperatives but only 436 urban shops) nonetheless comes closer to the Komvnutorg numbers than to those in Советская торговля. Стат. сборник. My approach to this morass is to privilege the data from the 1923 urban trade census (Труды ЦСУ 8 (5): 262-90) for urban trade, since these were the result of an actual count, and to adopt the numbers on rural trade most consistent with the other available quantitative and qualitative information. Nonetheless, on all of these questions, readers should be aware that my numbers are questionable.