LEGAL REGULATORS OF COMMERCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL ACTIVITY IN THE EAST OF RUSSIA (SUMMER 1918 — AUTUMN 1922)

Abstract

The article deals with the legal mechanisms of business regulation in the Urals, Siberia and the Far East under anti-Bolshevist governments. The author considers the political and economic context of the Civil War events in the east of Russia. The governments’ policy of restoring the rights of owners and the relative freedom of entrepreneurship, the presence of a network of commercial and industrial organizations, and the presence of a large number of lawyers in the supreme and central governing bodies of the anti-Bolshevist governments became the most important prerequisites for strengthening the role of legal regulators of business activity. In the east of Russia, legal grounds were developed for the continuation of the work of commercial and industrial institutions that had lost contact with their legal owners or parent institutions. The government expended and prolonged powers, replacing the principal and creating a temporary entity with the rights to enter into transactions on behalf of the owner, including the acceptance of financial obligations. The demands of the authorities for the full payment of debts by the owners, including the period when they did not manage their enterprises under the Soviet regime, were perceived as an injustice and an obstacle to the revival of industry, as well as the desire not to subsidize the restoration of production activities, but to credit on commercial terms. But the Civil War forced the authorities to restrict the rights of owners and their representatives to freely dispose of their property. It is crucially important that such restrictions were reversible, and could be lifted after emergency circumstances. The article also presents cases when anti-Bolshevist governments carried out the nationalization of the property of private and cooperative enterprises, and analyzes the reasons for such decisions.