The article is devoted to the problems of the formation of cooperative associations in the USSR in the 1920s. With the end of the civil war, the objective need to restore and establish the activities of cooperation urgently required economic science to analyze the place and functions of cooperation in the national economy of the country. The discussions around the question are analyzed – does Soviet cooperation belong to the socialist type of enterprises or not? The place of cooperative property in the economic system of the Soviet state is analyzed, the tendency in the formation and development of the idea of less maturity of cooperative property compared with the state is considered.

The article is devoted to the ideological reasons for the creation of projects and the construction of communal houses in the 1920s in a Soviet country. The article describes how the predecessors of scientific communism – Campanella, Thomas More, Fourier and others – imagined the city-commune. The article analyzes the architectural and planning ideas of the first years of Soviet power, the architects' rationale for the advantages of collective organization of settlement and life, and explores attempts to create new types of housing and public institutions, taking into account the specific historical conditions and tasks facing the country.