Consumer Services for Rural Population of Ukraine in the System of Consumer Cooperation (Second Half of the 1940s – 1960s): Structural Transformations and Outcomes
Abstract
The purpose of the research paper is to analyze the consumer services system in the countryside through the prism of consumer cooperation activities in the second half of the 1940s – 1960s and structural changes in the field associated with the centralization of management.
The scientific novelty is in the fact that for the first time, the problems of consumer services for the rural population are analyzed, focusing on the study of consumer cooperation activities in the specified period, the processes of structural changes in the management of the field, and the peculiarities of the social infrastructure of the village in the second half of the 1940s – 1960s.
Conclusions. The provision of consumer services was one of the areas of consumer cooperation activity in rural areas. However, besides the Ukoopspilka, the rural population was also provided consumer services by specific departments established under the Soviet authorities, collective farms, and state farms.
Despite the quantitative growth of consumer service institutions, the quality of service provision and the satisfaction of rural residents’ needs remained relatively low. Ukrainian peasants received a significant part of such services from private craftsmen ‘at home’ and during irregular trips to urban centers.
In order to centralize management and in accordance with the declared concern for the well-being of peasants, in the mid-1960s, all consumer service institutions were united in a single government structure – the Ministry of Consumer Services of Population of the Ukrainian SSR. Therefore, after 1966, that branch of providing social services for the rural population, following the party-government decision, was removed from the subordination of the Ukoopspilka, but it still did not fully meet the needs of rural residents in such services. Thus, the authorities’ attempts to improve the situation with rural consumer services by re-subordinating and centralizing of management without capital investments in the relevant infrastructure and without taking into account the real needs of the peasants turned out to be unsuccessful.
Independent Ukraine has primarily inherited the social infrastructure in rural areas, and research conducted by economists, historians, and sociologists on the problems of developing consumer services in rural areas is already in demand currently from the point of view of developing appropriate development plans for this field by central and local authorities.
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