Guild

The clandestine phenomenon was that it was officially impossible to organize either an enterprise or sell manufactured products. Therefore, the guilds found a way out - clandestine products were produced by the official state structure and these products were sold by an informal shadow structure. Or vice versa - the products were produced by the shadow structure, but came true through state trading organizations. The option, in which everything was completely illegal, was less common, since it was more difficult to put into practice, and it was too easily detected by the OBXSS authorities.

Raw materials for underground production were usually legally impossible to acquire. Therefore, to solve this problem, state-owned production enterprises were involved - as a rule , local industry enterprises - which served as the main raw material and production base of the workshop workers. By overestimating the need for raw materials, adding up, saving materials, drawing up acts of decommissioning and destroying, on a far-fetched pretext, actually suitable materials and raw materials and in other ways, surpluses were removed from state ownership, which were then used in the production of unaccounted goods. Additional products, as a rule, were made by workers of the same enterprise. In most cases, they did not suspect that their labor was used by the guilds for mercenary purposes. The manufactured products were secretly exported for their subsequent storage and sale on the black market or through the state wholesale and retail distribution network.

The activities of the guild workers were often intertwined with such a concept as a “pusher” (this was the name given to the suppliers of enterprises forced to operate in a planned economy in the Soviet slang), since the company could not always officially purchase the necessary raw materials and officially sell the produced product.

Even government officials were called into the crime syndicates of the guild guards to combat theft of state property, including auditors, investigators, and other law enforcement officials. These persons received bribes from the guilds and for this reason were interested in keeping the economic crimes unsolved. The guilds were also the target of extortion from organized crime, especially with the advent of racketeering in the USSR at the turn of the 1980s and 90s.

The guilds appeared in the USSR with the liquidation at the turn of 1920-30 of private ownership of the means of production and the introduction of state planned economic management. The first of the publicly disclosed cases in the USSR of the exposure of the guilds by the Soviet law enforcement agencies was the arrest of Shay Shakerman. As the head of the workshops in the neuropsychiatric dispensary , in 1958, Shakerman bought industrial sewing and knitting machines, which he secretly installed in the barracks of the hospital and used its patients to sew things that were fashionable at that time . In 1962, Shakerman was arrested, and in 1963, together with Boris Roifman, an accomplice (director of the Perovskaya textile factory, which had 60 underground enterprises in different regions of the country), was sentenced to death . During the searches, valuables worth about 3.5 million rubles were seized from them ^[1] .

In the 1970s, an increase in demand for consumer goods (especially clothing, shoes, spare parts for cars ) and the decomposition of law enforcement structures contributed to the revitalization of the guild. This period is also characterized by an increase in the efficiency of workshop production, the use of production waste as raw materials and a higher quality of products. In the late 1980s, the activities of the guild workers were legalized in connection with the elimination of restrictions on non-state entrepreneurial activity.

Famous groups

• Fur mafia of the USSR

• Fartsovschik
• Cooperative movement in the USSR
• Deficit in the USSR
• Shadow economy
• Garage economy

• Shoe industry // pressa.spb.ru
• d / f “Black business of developed socialism. Clovers ” // RTR , 2015.