STAFFING THE UKRAINIAN VILLAGE WITH AGRICULTURAL SPECIALISTS (1929 – 1939)

Abstract

Summary. The research objective is to analyze the problems and ways of personnel support of agricultural production, its impact on the formation of the social composition of the Ukrainian peasantry and to highlight its impact on the processes of transformation in 1929 – 1939.

The research methodology is based on the principles of historicism, objectivity, pluralism, multifactor, systematic character, comprehensiveness and continuity. The principle of historicism was implemented by a consistent analysis of the dynamics of the structural elements of the socioeconomic and national-cultural development of the Ukrainian village in 1929 – 1939 in the context of Soviet national policy. In his research the author kept to the principle of objectivity by using a significant number of historical facts, achievements of historiography, authenticity of written sources. Methodological pluralism is determined by the presence of various theoretical models of elucidation of political and social history, the main conceptual foundations of which are theories of totalitarianism and the principles of modernization. The system approach required an adequate methodology that avoids one-sidedness, fragmentarity and specificity, and hence the selectivity of problem analysis. System and comprehensive approaches to the research of the history of the Ukrainian peasantry involves multidisciplinary synthesis and analysis of the chosen problem in the context of the history of Soviet politics, political science, social history, sociology, the culture of Soviet everyday life, economic history, etc.

The analysis shows that the ways of forming the labor potential of the Ukrainian village and the expanded reproduction of national-cultural personnel were determined by the party-state leadership in the 30's of the twentieth century and have become an objective tendency that could be slowed down or distorted under the influence of Stalin's terror, but not canceled.

The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time in modern historiography stereotypes regarding the production activities of agricultural structures are critically revised under the conditions of building a general Soviet mechanism and forced industrialization in Ukraine during 1929 ‒ 1939 and the conceptual foundations of the formation of the system of training agricultural specialists, its forms are defined and the influence on the formation of the production layer and the intellectual and professional provision of the Ukrainian village is revealed.

Proved that the peasantry as a holistic social group suffered significant deformation and a new type of rural workers was gradually formed ‒ collective-farmers that were influenced by Bolshevik ideology. They were the most characteristic and most numerous group of all able-bodied members of the population of rural territories of Ukraine with all their peculiarities that were in the interests of totalitarian power. Additionally, in 1929 – 1939 the collective-farm peasantry formed the socio-professional groups, among which the most popular and notable people were machine operators, harvester and tractor drivers, which fit into the administrative-command system and could implement the planned agrarian reforms. Thus, in fact, the beginning of the break-up of the established way of life of Ukrainian peasants was the continuous collectivization and expropriation of individual peasant farms.

Conclusions. Consequently, the conceptual foundations for the formation of the Soviet in-service training system for agrarian specialists had determined its influence on the formation of the industrial stratum and the intellectual and professional provision of the Ukrainian village and the contribution of the Ukrainian peasantry to the implementation of the social programs of the Bolshevik regime and the «socialist modernization» of Soviet society, the development of which required new labor resources.