Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2020 number

The study focuses on the activities of Siberian urban consumer cooperation in 1912-1917 in the context of the problems of civil society and developing civil self-government. The author investigates the topic using a wide range of literature and sources within the framework of modernization theory, diffusionism concept, and «actor» approach. During the pre-revolutionary period, consumer cooperatives had an institutional, ideological, and real legal basis for autonomy from the state, self-activity, and self-government. This contributed to forming a new culture of social action related to the public control development over cooperative’s affairs and local life. Cooperatives performed an important function of social transformation of peasants who had moved to the cities into responsible citizens, mobilization of innovatively active people. The author analyzes data on 75 general meetings in 14 large Siberian city cooperatives; shows examples of cooperatives’ significance in economic, social and cultural spheres of Siberian cities, formation of new modern models of shareholders’ behavior. Pre-modern values of a part of shareholders, social disunion within cooperatives, and abuse of the cooperative-administrative resource by the left socialists had a deterrent effect on this process. The determining factors were not financial or technical, but organizational ones: collegiality, transparency, involvement of professional expertise, responsible specialists. Forming consumer societies as democratic self-governing public organizations led to strengthening their influence on the social life, especially during the First World War, when cooperation developed effective links with municipal government to solve food, school and other issues of local life.