South Urals industry in 20—30s of the XX century. Scientific research. Andrey Tikhomirov

type, which built their relations with the trusts on contractual commercial grounds.

      Syndicate capital was formed by bank loans, government loans, mutual funds from trusts and share issues. The main functions of syndicates were to assist their trust shareholders in selling finished products and providing them with materials, semi-finished products, raw materials and fuel. The activities of syndicates were built on a commercial basis (i.e., they were paid for). Their employees were interested in making a profit.

      In the very first years of their existence in the South Urals neither trusts nor syndicates were able to cope with the task of organizing an increasingly large trade turnover (especially in terms of territory). There were no competent state bodies which would be engaged at due level in studying of the nascent market, an account of demand and supply, effective regulation of commodity streams within cities, counties, provinces (oblasts), republics, the country as a whole.

      Occurrence, development and liquidation of the syndicate form of wholesale and exchange trade is explained by changes in the position and role of the state trade system in the country’s economy. They functioned until the state wholesale and wholesale and retail trade strengthened. The paradox is that they themselves contributed to it to the maximum extent possible.

      Cooperation has played a bigger role in the implementation of the new economic policy in the South Urals aimed at establishing commodity and market links between town and village than state trade.

      At the beginning of the new economic policy, all the main types of cooperation (consumer, agricultural, handicrafts) were merged into one consumer cooperative, because they were engaged in the same thing – preparation and distribution of products.

      The consumer cooperative society became an integral part of the state overlapping distribution apparatus. Deprived of any initiative and independence within it, it slowly agonized. In an environment of increasing commodity hunger, many cooperatives were ceasing their activities. In order to revive the cooperation, various activities were developed and implemented.

      The cooperation was given greater opportunities to participate in procurement and sales operations, it was given the opportunity to participate in procurement and sales operations on the basis of leases, nationalized enterprises were transferred to it on the basis of leases, credit operations of cooperative institutions were supported with the help of state loans, etc. However, the reality was that cooperative associations had to rely on their own resources, the shareholders’ funds.

      In 1929, construction began in the South Urals, in the Chelyabinsk region of Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Plant, which was part of a new coal-metallurgical base in the east – the Urals-Kuzbass. Magnitogorsk combine – a complex enterprise with a complete metallurgical cycle. Construction of the plant is carried out at a rapid pace. On May 15, 1931 operation of mine began, and on January 31, 1932 the first blast furnace was blown out.

      The newspaper “Smychka” for January 1930 writes: “From the conference on the study of productive forces of the Sredne Volga region, the Orenburg district was part of the Sredne Volga region at the time with the center in Samara,” … Run on the map of the Sredne Volga…Recently, just a few years ago, in the sleepy steppes and gloomy ledges of the Orenburg Okrug mountains, there appeared people with strange instruments, drilling machines, drilling the obese body of the earth, extracting its insides. And in them found the wealth of the region.