On the 26th of May, 1988 there was adopted the law that permitted cooperatives to deal with any legal activities, including trade. It was expected that cooperatives would eliminate trade deficit and lead to improved quality of service but what they got was speculation and financial transactions to cash money.

The picture was taken at the “All Union Exhibition of Cooperatives”: clothes for football fans were sold at this stand.

Who knows how many patties were sold?

Such overalls were the main products of many first Soviet cooperatives.

This is a cooperative shop: the women are working at the old sewing machines.

Such jeans were the most fashionable in the 80s.

Fakes of “Mawin” jeans were rather widespread.

These were the sneakers offered by cooperatives.

Artem Tarasov was the founder of the cooperative “Equipment” that offered computers, he became the first legal millionaire in the USSR.

It was the product of his cooperative.

It’s the ad of “MMM” cooperative that sold office equipment.

The creator of the first cooperative restaurant of the country fed all the participants of the exhibition of cooperatives with tasty food.

It’s the line at his restaurant.

And this is its menu.

This was how the restaurant looked inside.

The restaurant had many visitors, they all wanted to taste “new life” but most of them could only afford coffee or a shot of vodka.

The owner of the restaurant, Andrey Fedorov, became the symbol of a successful cooperative businessman.

However soon he got some competitors. In the Olympic Village, for example, there was opened a cafe-club “Near the Fountain”.

This was a cooperative night club.

In the very beginning of 1990 already existing cooperative cafes got the most powerful competitor – the transnational fast food.

This is a VCR “Electronics VM-12″ – the symbol of luxury and the subject of pipe dreams for millions of Soviet citizens.

The first Soviet video shop appeared in Arbat. It was followed by many thousands of others.

Video shops were almost everywhere: in sports sections, at housing offices, in old trams… Some of them were mobile. People could see cartoons as well as erotica.

It reads: “Wanna buy dollars”.

Profits of numerous cooperators were not controlled anyhow at all. Nowadays production cooperatives are not widespread as opposed to consumer cooperatives.

via istpravda.ru