VIII

THE COOPERATIVE MOVEMENT

WHEN LITHUANIANS spoke of the public interest or of its primacy over the private interest, they usually alluded to the state or to institutions controlled by the state. Popular consensus endowed the state with the all but exclusive right to declare what constituted the national interest. However, a significant minority, members of the cooperative movement, believed that their private interest coincided with the public good, and they worked tirelessly to convince others of this.

The Cooperative Way

COOPERATION, extolled by its proponents as a condition indispensable to the progress of the Lithuanian peasantry, answered a dual purpose. Primarily, it sought to improve the material welfare of the economically vulnerable peasant masses. But over and above their economic concerns, the cooperative societies served a variety of social and civic functions. “Our cooperative organizations, like no one else, are dedicated to the service of the popular masses, their social well-being, and the speediest possible development of their moral and material potentialities, as the most reliable fortifier of our nation’s independence and growth,”¹ asserted Petras Šalčius, Lithuania’s ranking exponent of cooperatives, before conferees from the three Baltic republics. The cooperative movement undertook the education of its members in the elementary attributes appropriate to good citizens:

A nation and its economy are not merely a sum of economic goods and the amount of business done, but millions of live and conscious human beings who must know not only how to produce economic goods each by himself but how . . . to take the field—in an orderly and joint manner—as one man, and how, in time of need, even to die for the nation’s welfare and its future. Only that nation will succeed in accomplishing this which even in time of peace knows how and is able to discuss and to do things together. . . . This training can be supplied only by cooperation, which even in time of peace accustoms people to the idea that many things can be accomplished only by a concurrent effort, which teaches men to act jointly, choosing as a base of this action not the interest and well-being of some one individual but the welfare of all. This is as much as to say that cooperation must . . . be a school of joint action . . . where each [individual] becomes inured to adjust his interest to the interests of others, to compel the submission of his will, his vagaries or caprices to the general will of the majority.²

Indeed, the devoted protagonists of the cooperative movement asserted that it “seeks the welfare of the whole [by] engaging wide popular masses in creative work, based on economic reality, and [by] proclaiming the multiple solidarity of all societies and all nations, mutual respect of interests, fraternal cooperation, and universal peace.”³

Membership in Cooperatives

THE BEGINNINGS of Lithuanian cooperation can be traced to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. However, not until the reestablishment of the country’s independence in 1918 did the movement acquire significant proportions. In the interwar decades the idea of cooperative effort had attracted numerous supporters from among the nation’s intelligentsia, farmers, and laborers. They founded hundreds of credit, insurance, consumers’, and producers’ cooperative societies, to further the economic well-being of small and medium-sized farm groups who, as a result of post-war land reforms, were the mainstay of Lithuanian agriculture. The types of cooperative and the number of registered cooperative societies are listed in Table 17. Membership in the cooperative movement is shown in Table 18. With assets estimated at more than 200 million lits,⁴ the 1,332 registered societies (not including establishments in the Vilnius area) were consolidated into six cooperative unions. Spurred by government assistance, the collective operations became so extensive that by 1939, according to one economist, there was not a single country household which did not deal with the cooperatives in one way or another.⁵ In a declaration which he read to the Seimas on April 5, Prime Minister Jonas Černius acknowledged the weighty contribution which the farm cooperatives had made in fostering the economic and cultural progress of the nation’s peasantry, and he further pledged to continue the government’s support of their activities in the future. On the whole, cooperation fared well in 1939. Although the Central Union of Dairy Cooperative Societies had a more profitable year in 1938 than in 1939, the total sales of all cooperative societies surpassed those of the previous year by 13 per cent.⁶

TABLE 17
Cooperative Societies
1938-1939

Source: Simutis, p. 35.

TABLE 18
Membership in the Cooperatives
1938-1939

Source: Petras Šalčius, “Lietuvos kooperacijos judėjimas 1938-1939 metais” (The Lithuanian Cooperative Movement in 1938-1939), Talka (Collective Action), June 15, 1940, pp. 322-326.

The cooperationists had problems, too. It was a matter of common knowledge that genuine popular interest in cooperative labor, so extensive in postwar years, was waning. A dispirited follower had to concede that with the exception of a few members, most had only a vague idea of what cooperation really was, although the cooperatives, with a membership of 200,000, were the largest formal organization in the nation.⁷

Beggarly Means

SOME COOPERATIONISTS conceded the truth of the allegation by economic commentators that collective action was a “beggarly means,” resorted to by less developed nations not by preference but by the necessity of accelerating economic growth. An increasing number of able, educated, and ambitious individuals deserted the cooperatives to take up business independently. According to their disapproving former associates, they were “selfish” people, usually store managers and lesser attendants, who wanted to get rich quickly. They could be found in almost every town. On the other hand, there were common grievances expressed by disillusioned cooperationists. They pointed to restrictions of freedom to realize individual ideas and to maximize individual potentialities which were attendant upon collective action. ”Many heads but little sense, much talk but little work,” asserted those who, in the eyes of cooperative devotees, wished to live off the labor of others.⁸

Government, the Camel in the Tent

GOVERNMENT OPENHANDEDNESS toward cooperative enterprises, evidenced by preferential legislation and financial aid totalling some 60,000,000 lits,⁹ encumbered the beneficiaries with a measure of interference in their internal affairs. Some cooperative workers felt that government meddling went too far and were distinctly annoyed by it. The Central Union of Dairy Cooperative Societies concluded that government decision makers were apt to pay no heed to the opinions of cooperatives, especially rural cooperatives. Governmental policies were frequently at odds with the attitudes of members of provincial cooperatives. An editorial in a cooperative newspaper regretted that:

. . . principles of the authoritarian form of government and of the planned economy find an ever wider application . . . in the administration of various sectors of our country’s life. It seems that in a sense such tendencies exert influence upon the life of our cooperative organizations, too .... More and more the cooperatives sense the “protection” of certain agencies, and they can no longer solve independently many problems—not only the more important ones but trifling too—but must act according to instructions. Plans for the distribution of profit, estimates of expenditures and receipts are being meticulously amended and changed by certain commissions.¹⁰

The journal continued by pointing out that such circumspect guidance from above hampered the activities of cooperatives by choking their creative initiative and dispiriting them in general. It counselled the administration to curb its interference in the affairs of cooperatives, lest nothing remain cooperative about their efforts but the name plate on the door.¹¹

Internal Failures of Cooperatives

COOPERATIVES ALSO SUFFERED from a number of technical and operational imperfections. All things considered, employment in cooperative societies had very little to offer. Monthly salaries of 120 to 150 lits for salesmen, clerks, and bookkeepers were tolerable. But over-all working conditions, long hours, and uncertainties about health insurance and old-age pensions prompted employees to seek jobs elsewhere, drained away members, and discouraged new applicants.¹²

As attested to by members and customers, the inadequate services of many cooperative stores were a source of considerable dissatisfaction.¹³ Campaigning for better service, the cooperative weekly frequently reproved its model salesman, a good-natured but somewhat remiss country lad, for dripping kerosene into a herring keg, for negligence in fulfilling promises made to customers, for reading novels while on duty, for failing to get up in the mornings to open the store on time, and for other similar lapses. The cooperative storekeepers were always apprehensive lest displeased buyers frequent private retailers instead. Toward the end of 1939 the Council of Agriculture was considering the adoption of a plan to allay these fears by markedly increasing the number of cooperative stores in provincial towns.¹⁴

Cooperative Propaganda

ONE CANNOT SAY that backers of cooperation were inactive in the face of these reverses. Quite the contrary, their efforts at checking the setbacks lacked neither energy nor ingenuity. In fact, it would be difficult to find a group which could have outdone the cooperative functionaries in the techniques of propaganda. “The sixth congress of cooperatives must turn into a huge . . . manifestation that cooperation in our country is alive, creative, determined to surmount all obstacles and to go into ever new fields of activity in the future.”¹⁵ Soviet seizure prevented the convention from meeting. However, the campaign for popular support left listeners with the impression that “poverty cannot be conquered without cooperation because there are too many individual exploiters, and we will not have enough time to satiate them all.”¹⁶ By means of an individual approach, public lectures, parades, and town festivals, which attracted tens of thousands of spectators and participants, the sedulous leaders carried their message directly to the masses. The cooperative organ Talka (Collective Action) addressed its readers in simple, comprehensible stories, cartoons, and poetry intended to demonstrate the superiority of cooperation. Its series of moralizing pictorial sketches showed how children could form cooperatives; how amply the cooperative rewarded a conscientious manager who withstood the devil’s temptations to squander public funds and to cheat customers at the scales; how a salesman persuaded a panicky lady not to hoard salt but, instead, to buy only one pound; how that same salesman made a donation to the army in the hope that the soldiers, upon return, would join the cooperaative; and how a customer advised the storekeeper to clean up the place and to display merchandise in the show window, instead of just staring through it. Talka and the men and women of the cooperatives made every effort to impart substance to their slogan that cooperatives were the nation’s economic and spiritual strongholds.