ABSTRACT
Mikhail Gorbachev raised the subject of manufacturing cooperatives in a speech delivered in July 1986 in Khabarovsk. Letters to the central authorities in Moscow, he said, showed there was wide popular support for a return to the system of manufacturing cooperatives, "which were eliminated in the fifties and sixties, evidently prematurely". Manufacturing cooperatives should be created, it was reported, with the aim of "more fully satisfying popular demand for consumer goods, household wares, and various services by making use of local resources, secondary raw materials and waste materials". While private ownership of the means of production was eliminated in the Soviet Union, two distinct forms of ownership, "state" and "cooperative", coexisted within the framework of a single planned economy. Among the most vocal advocates of expansion of the private sector was Anatolii Butenko of the Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System–the Moscow think-tank specializing in the study of Eastern Europe.
