HISTORICAL AND LEGAL ASPECTS OF THE SOVIET INDUSTRIAL COOPERATION AND MODERN SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The presented publication is conditionally divided into three interdependent parts: the pre-revolutionary era, the Soviet period, and the present. In the first part, the authors examine the conditions for the emergence and formation of cooperative relations in Russia, which reached their flourishing on the eve of 1917. Attention is drawn to the conditions for the support of the corresponding collective entities by the government of the Russian Empire. In the second part, the main attention of researchers is focused on the analysis of the state of affairs in such a sector of the Soviet economy as industrial cooperation. For many years, the leading normative legal act regulating this type of economic activity was the "Regulations on commercial cooperation", approved by the Decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR dated July 11, 1928 No. Many Russian historians, lawyers and economists try not to comment on the named document, or give it a one-sided and tendentious assessment that distorts reality. In reality, industrial cooperation, containing many elements of the market, was massive, as the numbers impartially indicate. So, on January 1, 1941, there were 25.6 thousand industrial cooperatives in the USSR, which united 2.6 million people. These associations have transformed the small handicraft industry. They grew into a widely developed system of cooperative-industrial production in all republics. First of all, cooperatives were engaged in the production of consumer goods and largely contributed to meeting the constantly growing needs of the country's population. The third part of the article comments on the recent additions to the Federal Law of the Russian Federation of July 24, 2007 No. 209-FZ (as amended on December 30, 2020) "On the development of small and medium-sized businesses in the Russian Federation." The new provisions give an official status to social entrepreneurship. Its purpose is to resolve many issues in the interests of representatives of the low-income strata of Russian society. According to the authors, the sphere of social entrepreneurship is called upon to restore the interrupted connection of times, since some elements of past regulatory legal acts can be creatively applied in the development and preparation of modern legislative projects.