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Industrial Cooperatives in the Post-war Ukraine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

V. J. Tereshtenko
V. J. Tereshtenko*
Affiliation:
Columbia University, School of General Studies
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Extract

The Emphasis which the Soviet Government places on the development of industrial cooperatives is a fact readily recognized by many foreign students of the USSR. Unfortunately, the information available on this interesting Soviet development is rather scant. Pertinent descriptive data published outside or the USSR leave so many distressing gaps that it is difficult to obtain a coherent picture of the cooperative system as a whole. Besides, the available data pertain mostly to the early thirties.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Slavic and East European Review , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , February 1951 , pp. 26 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1951

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References

1 The story of the former West Ukrainian cooperatives was not discussed at the conference with Mr. Filipov. Nevertheless, it may be appropriate to mention here that industrial cooperation was one of the rather successfully developing branches of the cooperative movement in the southeastern provinces of pre-war Poland. Industrial cooperatives of Jewish artisans in the region of Galicia were especially promising as one means of economic rehabilitation of the low-income groups in that section of Poland. Hardly was the whole net of consumer, agricultural, and industrial cooperatives, located in the territory re-incorporated into the USSR in 1939, reorganized and absorbed into the Soviet cooperative system, when the Germans invaded the USSR. In the course of the war, mass displacement of population and consequent loss of cooperative leaders caused the whole structure of the former West Ukrainian cooperatives to collapse completely. Some information on the old cooperatives in the first days of their reappearance in the territory of Poland after the war may be found in the author's article, “Le Mouvement Cooperatif en Pologne,” in the February, 1946, issue of the French Canadian Cooperative magazine, Ensemble. As to the cooperatives on the eastern side of the new frontier, they lost their identity as “Western Ukrainian” cooperatives and became an integral part of the post-war cooperative system of the Ukrainian SSR. Inasmuch as neither population nor official cooperative statistics is available for the period of 1939-1941, any attempt to distinguish between the effect of the German invasion and that of other factors which might have affected the fate of the former West Ukrainian cooperatives becomes merely guesswork. This leaves unsolved the question of a number of statistical discrepancies between figures on cooperation in the Ukrainian SSR in 1947 and those on pre-war Ukrainian cooperation in Eastern Poland.

2 When the writer raised this question in the course of the conference in Kiev, the President of the Ukoopromsovet and all the participating cooperative officials, to my surprise, started laughing. “What's wrong with my question?” said I. Mr. Filipov smilingly answered: “How can cooperators be members of the workers' unions?! After all, they are entrepreneurs and not workers!“