The curtailment of the NEP and the shift to forced industrialization in the late 1920s led to a radical restructuring of all economic activity in the USSR, including trade. First, during this period state financing of cooperation was sharply reduced. Second, there was a transition to targeted supply of industrial and food goods to shock sectors of production and the most important construction projects. Third, as state directive planning spread to consumer cooperation, the buying and selling of goods was increasingly replaced by allocation. Fourth, allocation employed a class-based approach: first-priority and preferential supply for the working class, the immediate expulsion of all kulaks and disenfranchised persons from district workers' cooperatives and city consumer societies, etc. Fifth, the priority development of heavy industry during the first Five-Year Plan led to a lag in the production of consumer goods; moreover, a significant share of them was used to support grain procurements. Thus, to stimulate peasants to deliver grain, in October 1928 the countryside received 70% (on average across Siberia) of the scarce goods that had arrived in the region [4, p. 6]. The full-scale collectivization carried out in the region was accompanied by a substantial reduction in marketable agricultural output.
All this resulted in a sharp rise in food prices: average market prices in Siberian cities from October 1928 to October 1929 increased 3.3 times for wheat flour, 4.4 times for rye flour, almost 2 times for clarified butter, and 3.5 times for potatoes. In March 1930, compared with March 1929, food prices in state and cooperative trade increased 2.5 times, and on the market 3 times [5, p. 295]. Throughout 1929, both Siberian and all-Union leading cooperative bodies repeatedly raised this issue and proposed urgent measures to prevent price increases in cooperative trade. For example, the appeal of the Centrosoyuz, the Cerab Section, and the Tranpo Section, "To Fight Price Increases," dated 22 March 1929, proposed measures to eliminate this dangerous phenomenon [6]. But it proved impossible to freeze prices, which could not but affect the fulfillment of party and government directives to raise workers' real wages. Labor statistics show a steady increase in the cost of the budget basket at cooperative prices. As of 1 April 1926 it amounted, for 18 Siberian cities, to 13 rubles 12 kopecks, while as of 1 April 1930 the cost of the budget basket for 22 cities and workers' districts of the region rose to 31 rubles 51 kopecks, i.e., almost threefold.
Under these conditions, party and Soviet bodies, in search of those to blame, instigated a campaign for an early purge of the apparatus of district workers' cooperatives and city consumer societies. In October 1929 the leaders of the Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk district workers' cooperatives were removed from their posts, and in late 1929 to early 1930 a purge of the apparatus of workers' cooperation in Siberia was carried out [8]. However, this measure did not guarantee a fundamental turnaround in workers' supply arrangements, the strained condition of which brought about important changes in the trade policy of the Soviet state. Thus, in the STO resolution of 11 September 1929, alongside recognizing cooperation as the main channel for goods, an increase in the share of state and other forms of social trade was permitted. The main reason was also indicated: consumer cooperation could not cope with turnover due to a lack of its own funds [9]. But in the late 1920s and 1930s, the financial position of cooperation continued to deteriorate: the need for funds to expand turnover and capital construction grew continuously, while state lending was reduced. If as of 1 October 1928 bank credit for the worker-urban sector of consumer cooperation in the USSR amounted to 23.4 million rubles, then as of 1 October 1929 it was 15.7 million rubles.
The worsening commodity shortage in the late 1920s led to an ever larger number of goods moving into the category of scarce items, until scarcity encompassed all the main groups. It became necessary to move from a system of sale to allocation and provisioning both in the city and in the countryside: rationing covered almost the entire mass of goods. Special reports of Siberian OGPU bodies, the Siberian Regional Committee of the VKP(b), and minutes of meetings of authorized representatives of district workers' cooperatives and city consumer societies recorded many cases of dissatisfaction among workers and employees with the state of supply. Thus, during the reporting-and-reelection campaign of 1928/29, in the speeches of members of district workers' cooperatives and city consumer societies in Siberia, the most frequent topic was insufficient supply of industrial and food goods—29.9% of all speeches; second were problems of cooperation and share contributions—13.1%; third, the activity of the cooperative apparatus—9.6%; fourth, the quality of goods—8.9%; fifth, prices, etc. Unlike the analogous campaign of 1927/28, the speeches in 1928/29 "took the character of criticism of the leadership of workers' cooperation... of workers' supply policy and the direction of workers' cooperation work," and even of "the policy of the Soviet state in its offensive against the kulak and the speculator."
Documents published recently indicate that dissatisfaction with provisioning was a widespread phenomenon throughout the USSR [12, pp. 19–21]. In turn, the authorities defined supply difficulties as temporary and shifted responsibility for the situation onto NEPmen and employees of cooperative and state trade. Thus, J. V. Stalin, in the political report of the Central Committee to the 17th Congress of the VKP(b) (27 June 1930), subjected consumer cooperation to harsh criticism for the alleged unwillingness of the cooperative apparatus to lower prices, a certain "NEPman (petty-trader) spirit" supposedly inherent in cooperation, etc.
The leader's assessments served as the basis for the adoption by the USSR Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the VKP(b) of a number of decisions to restructure the work of consumer cooperation under the new conditions. The joint plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the VKP(b) (December 1930) adopted a resolution in which its work was deemed unsatisfactory; to remedy the situation it proposed to root out the petty-trader spirit from cooperative organizations and to conduct another purge of the apparatus of hostile elements. According to another plenum decision, it was necessary to organize first-priority supply for the most important industrial enterprises and construction projects.