Formation And Development Of Agrarian Cooperation In The Russian Economy

We believe that many people remember the brilliant achievement of Russian cooperation - the butter and cheese production, convincingly demonstrating the enormous reserves of the cooperative movement of Russia and securing the country’s second place in world butter exports after Denmark in 1906. In 1914 a quarter of the world's butter was sold by Russia. Twice as much money came from the export of butter to the state treasury than from gold.

By the beginning of 1917, a predisposition for the formation of an integrated cooperative system had formed in Russia, as demonstrated by the statistics of those years. Volumes of Russian cooperation production for 1900-1917 increased 35 times and from 1910 to 1917 - almost 4.5 times.

However, the triumph of the October Revolution of 1917, the policy of war communism during the civil war (1913-1921) ultimately ceased all forms of cooperative management. The agricultural market was completely destabilized; the products were taken from the peasants by food detachments almost for nothing. Peasants began to reduce crops, gross production reduced as well. Even replacing the surplus-appraisal with a tax-deductible tax, the average percentage of goods sold on the market to those produced by peasants did not exceed 11% against 26-29% - until 1917. Cooperation in its original historical understanding was destroyed in all its forms (Table 02 ).

A significant contribution to the powerful revival of cooperation was made by the NEP period, which was a kind of logical continuation of the development of the Stolypin transformations period. It is marked by the global growth rate of the number of cooperatives and their unions in vertical and horizontal directions. Spheres of their influence on all areas of agricultural production are increasing, despite the fact that the capital gain in peasant farms in 1923 relative to the level of 1915 was only 40%. In 1929, over 80% of all peasant homesteads were involved in various types of cooperation. For the years 1921-1928 the number of agricultural cooperatives increased by more than five times, the data of the association of the peasant population in cooperatives increased by 20 times (Gataullin & Sagatgareev, 2019).

This period in the formation of a unique single trading market throughout the country is characterized by the development of the cooperative movement, which undoubtedly had a positive impact on almost all key sectors of agricultural industry, such as: Flax Center , “Bakery Center”, “Potato Center”, “Plodvincenter”, “Poultry Union”, “Soyuzsahar”, etc., uniting more than twenty independent independent cooperative unions of cooperatives united in the “Union of Unions of Agricultural Cooperation of the RSFSR”.

At the same time, the intensive development of the cooperative movement in agriculture revealed some helplessness of the then existing national structures in the ability to guarantee stable work in the production sector, as well as in the sphere of market circulation, and the service sector. The guarantee of steady work in the agricultural sector of the economy has declined.

Processing and sales and supply co-operation was revived, providing initial processing of agricultural commodity products in the activities of the butter and potato-processing enterprises, fruit and vegetable drying and other cooperatives

The sales, supply and credit types of cooperation played dominant role in the production activities of the peasants at that time. Sales and supply cooperatives not only marketed agricultural products of peasants, but also supplied seeds and other means of production, which intensified agricultural production and increased the level of marketability of products. The share of sales and supply cooperation in the procurement of consumer goods in the 1920s increased from 10 to 46.2%.

From the very beginning of the NEP, virtually all commodity circulation had returned to private hands, which entailed not only the establishment of new rules and strategies for commercial turnover, but also to a considerable degree influenced the entire strategy of social production, exchange, distribution and consumption of material goods in rural areas.

At the same time, the sphere of cooperation in processing, marketing, and supply has been reactivated. It provided initial processing for the activities of cooperatives for the production of butter, potato cooperatives, fruit-drying cooperatives and others (Nasretdinova & Nasretdinova, 2016).

The dominant role in production activities was provided at that stage by sales, supply and credit types of cooperation. The cooperatives associated with the sales and supply were engaged in the sale of agricultural products to the peasants, and supplied grain, milk, meat and other means of production, which intensified the volume of agricultural production and increased the value of goods turnover (Gizatullin et al., 2018). In the procurement of products, the share of sales and supply cooperation increased in the 1920s by more than a third - from 10 to 46.2 %

The unity in the desire to increase sales and supply benefits prompted agricultural producers to their dynamic development and the opening of other types of cooperatives. Based on the reforms of the NEP stage, associated with to commodity-money exchange were structured, and therefore at the end of 1925 the in-kind food tax was changed to a single tax. Subsidies and various measures of state support for industrial cooperation from 1927 to 1930 amounted to more than 719 million rubles.

Under the influence of scientific and technological progress, the organization of cooperatives integrated by the vertical type led to radical transformations of productive means and mechanisms, technological and labor processes, as well as transformations in the nature of their activities. Their development was seen in further centralized planning and management of economic activity, in organizing a coherent policy of technical development, reducing production costs, in developing the potential for introducing the latest methods and modern technological methods of production, which contributed to the integration with self-proclaimed research and development departments.

On the basis of cooperation between collective farms, feeding stations had been established, as well as organizations for the provision, storage and processing of plant materials, meat and dairy and other agricultural and non-agricultural products, stations for artificial insemination of animals, poultry farms, etc. It was natural as isolated peasant farms experienced evident lack of means and opportunities. In addition, the transformation of cooperation continued even with the formation of a wide infrastructure: building educational and medical institutions, camps for children, recreation and tourist centers, developing leisure centers for youth and senior citizens. In republics, collective and inter-farm cooperative movement was widespread in various sectors of agriculture, most often in livestock, in its main areas - cattle and pigs feeding.

The economic effect of collective labor was manifested not only in the high efficiency of labor, but also in the fact that the shareholder enterprises were stimulated by an increase in the results of work on the basis of their involvement in sharing their profit (Gataullin et al., 2014).

The unique economic stability of the various cooperative movements was vividly demonstrated in times of war and revolutionary shocks. It was to a large extent through cooperation, that society had been able to withstand hopeless economic chaos and disintegration. Acting as a significant economic and social force, cooperation came to the center of interest of the Bolshevik power and in the years of Soviet history felt and was subjected to significant transformations and experiments.

The resulting vector of its development in the competition absence and private capital and a market economy is becoming more and more stringent subordination to government bodies, bureaucratization, loss of features and principles of organizational structure inherent in cooperation. It is no coincidence that the reforms of the Soviet economy and political system, that began in the second half of the 1980s were performed through cooperation and small enterprise development. Through cooperation, significant aspects of the development of the economy in pre-revolutionary Russia and during the NEP of the 20th anniversary were noted (Kunakova, Belyaeva, Nikitina, & Movsumzade, 2016). The cooperation felt the oppressive blow of the Stalinist collectivization and the transformations of the 1950s with practical nationalization, which were carried out under the banner of the "advantages of socialist socialization." But cooperation is not only history, but also a solution to the problems caused by market reforms in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, which will be more successful the more fully historical experience will be taken into account.

The period of 1970-80s is determined by the emergence of inter-farm cooperation in a number of regions and republics of the former USSR of a total. It took place mainly in the field of agricultural construction, partly in the field of processing and other sectors of the agro-industrial complex. Inter-farm cooperatives were organized, such as Mezhkolkhozstroy, in which the rural construction industry started on the units of collective farms and state farms in township districts. Under certain conditions, collective and state farms, on the basis of units, enlarged their production capabilities. They were located near a certain processing organization, for example, near a sugar factory. Industrial or scientific-production association was organized by a similar type. Inter-farm unions, supposed and positioning themselves as organizations of a cooperative form, in fact did not realize themselves as such in the circumstances of the command-administrative economic system. The principles of organization of the economy and the economic mechanism of their functioning, working during this period, quickly transformed the economic basis of inter-farm cooperation, changing the inter-farm union into an ordinary state structural unit with all its qualitative characteristics: centralized planning, lack of true economic freedom, equal distribution of shareholders’ profit without its final correlation with final results of production management and disregarding equity interest in strengthening cooperative ownership. In inter-farm cooperatives, state views on the organization of production prevailed. All members of agricultural cooperatives, including inter-collective farm organizations, while maintaining the status of an independent legal entity, were no longer entitled to fully control the cooperative work of the inter-farm association.

Thus, the period of 1934-1984 was not only not a natural expansion and deepening of effective trends of fruitful developing cooperative activity in agricultural production, but also became a period of its liquidation as a qualitative integral structure.

During this period, Russian agriculture has been globally driven away from Western countries, in which rural cooperation has rooted and has become a stable foundation for protecting the economic interests of agricultural producers, united in industry unions and having diverse state support.

The period of the modern formation of agricultural cooperation, when the reason for creating conditions conducive to its restoration has ripened, deserves close attention. It is determined, firstly, by the development of a multistructured agrarian economy as a base for agricultural production, the revival of peasant farms, agricultural production cooperatives and other modern agrarian organizational forms of entrepreneurship, as well as sanctions and requirements relating to the field of agricultural production and trade (Nasretdinova, 2012).

The current period of the formation of agricultural cooperation combines the revival and emergence of diverse cooperative forms of management: agro-industrial complexes such as Kuban in the Krasnodar Territory (in which the principles of cooperation are restored), cooperative unions like Agricultural Association Novomoskovskoye in the Tula region with an exclusively expressed cooperative mechanism for organizing economic production; agricultural production cooperatives, unions of cooperatives, the so-called coopfarms like Krutishinsky, joint farmsteads and the absolutely newest formations of the agrarian orientation of the entrepreneurial type, with the transformation of the collective and state farms into joint stock companies and limited partnerships, collective organizations (Faritov, Shiriyazdanova, Nasretdinov, & Nasretdinova, 2016).

All these organizational forms of management are characterized by a cooperative nature as the basis of farm-management. In all these forms of management, cooperative relations development is based on cooperative principles (voluntariness, economic independence of structural units, mutual economic interest in joint labor results, commercial calculation, contractual principles, etc.). These principles stem from the very economic essence of cooperation as a form of organization of labor and production and as a social form of collective associations (enterprises and various agro-structures). The production structure of these agricultural entities is also based on the principles of cooperation. As already noted, in the Agricultural Association Novomoskovskoye cooperative all production agroservice, including processing, sale of agricultural products, production and maintenance, supply and marketing, design and construction work, is carried out through industry cooperatives: crop, meat and dairy, design and construction, industrial and technical and sales and supply.

The absolute superiority of cooperation in comparison with other organizational and legal forms in agriculture is explained by the following key principles of the organization of cooperatives - there is a potential to consolidate actions, to pool labor, material and financial resources for their optimal implementation in cooperatives with a particularly noble motivation for work;

- cooperation allows you to better adapt to the market and flexibly respond to changing demand, improve the entrepreneurial abilities of rural producers;

- cooperation contributes to a more equitable distribution of profit, economic and social guarantees for rural workers (Kuzyashev & Topunova, 2017).

Despite positive economic effect, a decrease in the quantitative composition of agricultural cooperatives gives rise to cooperation as a result of a rapid decrease in the number of farms, which threatens to reduce both the volume of production of cooperatives and the social base of cooperation. In a number of countries, these trends resulted in weakening of a certain type of prohibitions in the development of labor relations in cooperatives where producers of goods do not have membership in the cooperative (Fattakhov, Nizamutdinov, & Oreshnikov, 2018). Another result is the refinement and development of new rules and principles for relations with these producers.

At the same time, the objective process of joining efforts to achieve the best indicators of the development of agribusiness, as well as other sectors of the national economy, is associated with the implementation of the principles of integration. In so doing, the process of concentration is gaining strength, developing in two directions: there is a concentration of single-industry cooperatives, that is, horizontal integration; and their merger is carried out with the loss of their independence from processing enterprises, that is, the process of vertical integration (Kuzyashev, Nasretdinova, Akhmedina, & Rakhmatullin, 2019).

There are multiple approaches to the definition of the term “agro-industrial integration”. We have chosen the following one: agro-industrial integration is the process of organizational integration of agricultural enterprises with enterprises of other sectors of the agro-industrial complex, which has economic motives and can take place in various organizational and legal forms, as well as the subsequent strengthening and development of their interaction.