Annotation: What truly distinguished credit agricultural associations, consumer societies, and artisanal cooperatives from one another, given that they were all forms of the same economic phenomenon—the cooperative—that arose in Russia during the wave of the Great Reforms? Why did governments in both pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russia support such a diverse array of cooperative enterprises? And what made cooperatives so appealing to representatives of radically opposing political movements? In this groundbreaking study, Anna Safronova examines the history of Russian cooperatives and the cooperative movement in its entirety, from its beginnings to the era of Stalin's "Great Break." She explores how different forms of cooperation adapted to often contradictory economic conditions and models. Safronova argues that cooperative discourse was highly versatile and generally aligned with the political objectives of societal transformation. However, ordinary cooperative members often interpreted their involvement in ways that diverged significantly from the intentions of state agents driving modernization. This disconnect led to mutual disillusionment with cooperatives as a tool for reform in both the pre-revolutionary and Soviet periods of Russian history. Anna Safronova is a historian and PhD graduate who completed her dissertation in history at Sorbonne University, Paris 1, in 2022.