ABSTRACT
Credit cooperative activity began to grow in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. The “Small Credit Institutions Act” of 1895 called for the development of: savings and loan associations and joint stock banks; and village, volost or village banks and savings institutions. The Act of 1904 gave general control of small credit institutions to the Ministry of Finance in which a special committee was established just for this purpose. Before the war, the network of cooperative credit associations of various types covered all of Russia, and they loaned 500 million rubles yearly. Agricultural cooperatives were a third important area of the cooperative movement in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. There were two types of cooperatives: agricultural societies and agricultural associations. The progress in agriculture so typical of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century was closely tied to the development of cooperative credit and all forms of agricultural cooperation.
