Public Catering in Buryatia in the 1920s and Early 1930s

Abstract

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of public catering in the complicated political and socio-economic conditions of the first decade of the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR. Based on different archival sources the author reconstructs the following parameters of the public catering system: the existing republican network of enterprises, turnover, personnel, forms and methods of work organization; describes the problems of the new sphere (facilities and equipment, personnel) and the level of customer services culture. Newspaper articles cover the everyday activities of canteens and the relations between the actors in the catering sector. In the 1920s, enterprises of various forms of ownership, including private ones, operated in the Republic, and steps were taken to organize a catering system similar to the one that existed in the country as a whole. In the process of creating the industry, the consumer co-operative society took an active part. The political and economic decisions of the state in the early 1930s determined the place and role of catering in social reproduction, focusing on meeting the needs of workers in the industrial and agrarian sectors of the economy, students of the national education system. During this period, the structure of the industry was formed, which included state and cooperative components, there was a significant expansion of the network of enterprises, there was a process of streamlining their activities.