The Issue of Agricultural Creditation to the Peasantry of the Middle Dnieper Region in the Work of Local Committees of the Special Meeting on Agricultural Industry (1902–1903)

Abstract

The article examines the activities of local committees of the Special Meeting on Agricultural Industry to address the issue of agricultural lending to the peasantry of the Middle Dnieper region and its impact on the development of agriculture in the region. Special attention is paid to the work of local committees of the Kyiv, Poltava, and Podolsk provinces. It was found that local committees noted the lack of peasant credit institutions and actively advocated for the development of credit and savings and loan associations and the spread of various types of cooperatives in the peasant environment.

An analysis of the proposals of local committees of the Special Meeting on Agricultural Industry regarding the creation and operation of county cash offices, savings and loan associations, and rural banks was conducted. Attention was paid to the proposals of individual local committees, which concerned the organizational and legal principles of the functioning of credit institutions, mechanisms for providing loans, their structure, volumes and role in stimulating agricultural production. Attention is drawn to the fact that among other types of agricultural credit, the problems of which were discussed at meetings of local committees of Dnieper Ukraine in 1902-1903, there were issues related to the activities of the Peasant Land Bank. It was concluded that the work of local committees on the problems of credit provision for agricultural producers was generally quite active. The committee members paid the most attention to small, so-called ‘people’s’ credit, the purpose of which was to increase the material well-being of local peasants, which was explained primarily by the fact that it was the poorest segments of the Ukrainian countryside that were essentially deprived of access to mortgage or other types of credit, which required collateral, mainly real estate, which for obvious reasons, the poorer rural producers practically did not have. As for savings and loan associations and rural banks, these small credit institutions also could not meet the needs of farmers for loans due to the lack of sufficient free funds among the members of such institutions to provide credit services. The result of their work was the development of specific, in some cases quite reasonable, proposals for improving agricultural lending to the peasantry. Some of these proposals were taken into account by the Special Meeting and partially implemented in 1903-1904, as well as during the Stolypin agrarian reform.