Gaps in government regulation of the cooperative industry sector in the USSR in the 1950s (case study of Chelyabinsk region)

The article considers the impact of federal and regional authorities on cooperative enterprises of Chelyabinsk region during 50s of the XX century. Via the institutional method, the author analyzes the practices and techniques used by the control authorities to determine the norms of raw material consumption, gross volume, assortment and production costs, as well as to assess the achieved productivity level, profitability and efficiency of the non-governmental industrial sector in satisfying the daily needs of the population. The research reveals that targeted planning, administered pricing and moral incentives in the form of «socialist competition» and «Stakhanov movement», previously applied to industrial artels, in the conditions of post-war realities took little account of their both increased capacity and organizational-and-economic specificity. Rigorous administration, expressed in the imposition of cumbersome and speculative-bureaucratic schemes of business document flow, did not correspond to the emerging market conditions. The local party and Soviet leadership did not welcome the proposals of cooperative producers to optimize the approval procedure of new samples of commodity products that were in high demand, as well as to give them the opportunity to conduct their own marketing and sales strategy. As a result, the emerging imbalance was not eliminated, which hampered the further development of collective entrepreneurship.