The role of small-scale industries and artisans as part of the study of the Soviet handicraft industry during the NEP using the example of Kharkiv (1921–1928).
The handicraft industry belonged to the oldest and traditional forms of social and production activity of the Ukrainian population and during the NEP years took up a prominent place in the national economy of Ukraine and Kharkiv in particular. The terms »artisan« and »craftsman « should be regarded as small-scale producers who engaged in industrial production on their own, using manual labor or a mechanical engine.
Once consolidated on the Ukrainian lands, the new Bolshevik government began to implement a policy of military communism. As a result, in the late 1920s the Ukrainian economy was in a very difficult, which was the embodiment of the Bolsheviks' utopian desire to build a communist system at any cost. Against the background of deteriorating living conditions, social tensions grew. The country suffered from a food crisis as a result of the decline in production and the closure of businesses.
In conditions of goods famine and total unemployment, the state began to look for a way out of the crisis.
In such conditions, it was artisanal production that was supposed to reduce goods famine and alleviate the problem of unemployment.