Yuriy F. Smirnov

PhD in History, head of the Department of the Use of the Russian Administrative Resource documents of the Tula Oblast State Archive

(Tula, Russia)

Abstract. The article analyzes the supply system of the population of Tula in the early 1930s based on archival documents. The author focuses on the formation, development and key problems of the activities of the distributors of a closed workers' cooperative, to which the bulk of the Tula proletariat was assigned. The centralized supply, which replaced the market, had to take over the provision of the population with food and manufactured goods. The article discusses the features of access to goods for various categories of the population, which consisted in the importance of enterprises and institutions where people worked. The filling of the food set, which was dispensed in the distributor, depended on this. Workers of large industrial enterprises, enterprises of the defense industry and workers of shock construction projects received the highest food ration. An important role in the system of supplying the population with food in the early 1930s. Public catering began to play, which was supposed to provide the majority of the proletariat with hot meals. Attention is paid to the problems that arose within the framework of centralized supply, in particular the constant shortage of necessary food and clothing and the impossibility of purchasing them on the free market. The article examines the reaction of the population to the emergence of an acute deficit, queues, rising prices for essential products, and the authorities' supply policy. The degree of food availability directly influenced the social well-being of the townspeople and criticism of the authorities from this point of view was rather harsh. The difficulties that the townspeople had to face formed a suppressed psychological mood, created a breeding ground for the spread of rumors. The author concluded that centralized supply, which was the result of the government's purposeful policy to destroy the free market, led to the collapse of the relative material well-being of the proletariat that existed in the previous period.
Keywords: Tula, the proletariat, the system of centralized supply, indoor workers' cooperative, catering, industrialization.

Full text of the article (PDF)

For citation: Smirnov, YF 2020, ‘Supply system of tula workers during the first five-year plan’, Tula Scientific Bulletin. History. Linguistics, issue 4 (4), pp. 36-45., URL: http://tula-vestnik.ru/pdf/2020/vipusk_4_29_12_20.pdf (in Russ.)

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