Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки (Sep 2021)
Membership Fees in the History of the All-Union Society of Book Lovers: The Economy and Ideology of a Late Soviet Mass Organisation
Abstract
This article considers the financial side and specifically the phenomenon of membership fees in the history of a mass voluntary organisation of the late Soviet period, i.e. the All-Union Society of Book Lovers. The purpose of the article is to examine the role of fees in the structure of the organisation’s income and identify contradictions that arose within the Society in their relation. The article refers to the company’s accounting documents, materials of congresses, the corporate newspaper Knizhnoe Obozrenie, and letters of book lovers to the leadership of the society. Based on the results of the study, it is concluded that the management of the organisation and ordinary participants treated the annual fee with different pragmatics. Officials needed money for the structure, so they sought to increase the number of collective and individual members of the Society and fees from them. Initially, collective participants provided the flow of money to the organisation. Later, their share in the total budget decreased with the growth of contributions from ordinary book lovers. The popularity of reading and book hunger caused the new organisation to be seen by its members as a means to get books: they directly connected membership fees with the opportunity to get books that were in deficit. The lack of official guarantees for books and subscriptions caused outrage among book lovers who meticulously paid their fees and could lead to their refusal to pay to the Society. In a situation like this, the existence of the organisation and the format of the mass organisation were doubted. The ambiguous perception of the state initiative in the field of reading on the part of citizens helps examine the relations of society and government in the late Soviet period in a more detailed way.
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