Abstract
Alexander Sobolev – Doctor of Science in Economics, Professor, Russian University of Cooperation. Address: 12/30, V.Voloshina St., Mytishchi, Moscow Region, 141014, Russian Federation. E-mail: sobolev-alekc@mail.ru
 Alexander Kurakin – Senior Researcher, Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology, National Research University Higher School of Economics; Senior Researcher, Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). Address: 11, Myasnitskaya St., Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation. E-mail: akurakin@hse.ru
 Vladimir Pakhomov – Doctor of Science in Economics, Professor, Russian University of Cooperation. Address: 12/30, V.Voloshina St., Mytishchi, Moscow Region, 141014, Russian Federation. E-mail: vmpahomov@yandex.ru
 Irina Trotsuk – Doctor of Science in Sociology, Senior Researcher, Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; Associate Professor, RUDN University. Address: 82, Vernadskogo Av., Moscow, 119571, Russian Federation. E-mail: irina.trotsuk@yandex.ru
 Citation: Sobolev A., Kurakin A., Pakhomov V., Trotsuk I. (2018) Cooperation in Rural Russia: Past, Present and Future. Mir Rossii, vol. 27, no 1, pp. 65–89. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2018-27-1-65-89
 
 The authors consider cooperation as a specific, alternative form of economic organization to the standard business firm within a market economy, and focus on agricultural cooperation in Russia. First, the article engages with the key milestones of the history of cooperation in Russia: (1) the first attempts to establish cooperative organizations before the Russian Revolution (agricultural societies, agricultural partnerships and credit cooperatives) which gave the poor rural population a chance to improve living standards and ensured promising prospects for the long-term development of cooperation in all forms; (2) the dependent forms of consumer and production cooperation under the Soviet regime that deprived all collective forms of their true cooperative nature. In the second part of the article, the authors describe the current state of the cooperative movement in the Russian countryside and identify its basic features, such as opposition to family farming and the state capitalist tendencies of the concentration and vertical integration in the form of agroholdings; state rural cooperation policies which aim to promote and financially support small farming including the development of rural cooperatives; the number and types of cooperatives in the countryside; the reasons for debates on cooperation legislation; the viability of the main types of agricultural cooperatives (production, consumer, credit cooperation). Finally, the authors emphasize that cooperation in contemporary Russia does not fit the classic Western scheme of cooperative development and still has to overcome a number of substantial challenges (the soviet legacy, lack of bottom-up initiatives, the ideological and economic dominance of large-scale farming, poor academic expertise in the field of cooperation studies).
Highlights
Russian legislation qualifies all these types of cooperation as consumer cooperatives, and identifies agricultural production cooperatives engaged in collective farming that existed before the Revolution as artels and after collectivization as kolkhozes
Agricultural cooperative – an organization established by agricultural producers and owners of private subsidiary holdings on the basis of voluntary membership for joint production or other economic activities based on the consolidation of property shares to meet material and other needs of its members (Federal Law No.193 adopted on 08.12.1995 ‘On Agricultural Cooperation’)
Despite its long historical tradition, the cooperative sector in contemporary Russia still has to overcome a number of substantial challenges, which are the following: 1) Soviet legacy: the Soviet forms of cooperation have not been eliminated completely
Summary
The first attempts to establish cooperative organizations in the form of ‘production artels’ can be traced back to the 17th century [Kalachev 1864; Isaev 1881; Shherbina 1881; Sbornik materialov ob artelyakh v Rossii 1873]. Agricultural societies were primarily educational and cultural organizations without capital or financial responsibility of members for the cooperative obligations. Agricultural societies such as the Free Economic Society and the Moscow Agricultural Society played an important role in the Russian cooperative movement [Morachevsky 1914; Glebov 1908; Bradley 2009]. By 1915, there were about 6,000 agricultural societies at national and regional (province, volost, and uyezd) levels that were to develop peasant agronomy as non-government and non-profit organizations They were engaged in educational activities and in the economic support of farmers for the purchase of modern agricultural machinery, high-quality seeds and fertilizers, marketing of agricultural produce, etc. Agricultural cooperation laid the foundations for the economic and cultural development of the Russian countryside for at least 1/3 of peasant farmers who freely joined cooperatives [Bilimovich 2005]
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