Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2014 number

The article analyzes the information potential of the sources on the history of pre-revolutionary urban consumer cooperation. The author analyzes such historical sources as legislative acts, office and secretarial documents of the government and cooperative organizations, reports of cooperative conventions, notes and essays of cooperative societies’ functionaries, statistical publications. These materials are contained in the central and local state archives and periodicals. This refers to the administrative documentation of municipal authorities, reports of police ranks, petitions, protocols of general meetings, charters and reports of cooperative organizations. Taken together they depict the legal and socio-economic conditions of commercial and cultural activities of cooperatives, the nature and evolution of their relations with the authorities, contribution to overcoming the food crisis. Office documents are accurate in fixing the facts. Reference and statistical sources are important for systematization of information about cooperation. Proceedings of the co-operative congresses, essays and notes of the functionaries of Siberian co-operation provide rich material for the study of questions of co-operative ideology and practice. Materials from periodicals significantly expand and elaborate on the existing views on the urban consumer co-operation of Siberia. They are of particular importance for studying the consumer cooperatives within the framework of the concept of civil society, allowing retrieving from the contemporaries’ observations the set of certain values, motivations and mental attitudes, ways of thinking and patterns of behavior typical for the initiative and ordinary participants of the co-operative movement in the cities and villages. The author concludes that fragmented and piecemeal nature of the source base of the research suggests the need for complex use of the information potential of all types of sources.