THE POLICY OF “DISARMAMENT” AS A THE PREMISE OF SUBJUGATION OF THE UKRAINIAN COUNTRYSIDE UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF THE “GREAT TURNING POINT” OF 1929 – 1933

Serhii  KORNOVENKO; Oleksii  KOMPANIIETS

doi:10.24919/2519-058X.31.306362

Authors

Serhii KORNOVENKO PhD hab. (History), Full Professor, Director of the Research Institute Institute of Peasantry and Study of Agrarian History, Bohdan Khmelnytskyi Cherkasy National University, Ukraine https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6268-2321
Oleksii KOMPANIIETS PhD student, Department of Archeology and Auxiliary sciencies of history, Bohdan Khmelnytskyi Cherkasy National University, Ukraine https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6239-3039

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24919/2519-058X.31.306362

Keywords:

disarmament, unarming, debilitating, The “Great Turning Point” of 1929 – 1933, Soviet Ukraine, peasantry, collectivization, resistance

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to find out the mechanisms and means of “disarmament” of the Ukrainian countryside in the 1920s and early 1930s in the context of overcoming resistance to the policy of the Soviet authorities in the countryside. In a broader sense – to give an answer to the key question: why did the peasantry, having a colossal numerical advantage, lose the competition for the future, was forcibly taken under control and brutally pacified? The methodological basis of the research was concrete historical, comparative historical and analytical methods. The scientific novelty. The article formulates the author’s definition and reveals the essential features of “disarmament” of peasantry in Soviet Ukraine during the period of the 1920s – 1930s. Conclusion. The “disarmament” of the Ukrainian countryside in the 1920s and at the beginning of the 1930s was a complex of hybrid measures that was organized by the Soviet authorities in 1919 with the aim of subjugating the peasantry and depriving them of the means to wage an insurrectionary struggle and further resist the policies of the Bolsheviks. “Disarmament” is not reduced only to the process of “pumping out” weapons from the village, which accumulated there under the conditions of the end of the Great War, the revolutionary events of 1917 – 1921, as well as the peasant resistance to the policy of the Bolsheviks in the 1920s – at the beginning of the 1930s. The authors substantiate the “disarmament” of the village in a broader context – as a system of hybrid combined government measures aimed both at the “disarming” of weapons (in the military sense) and at the destruction of traditional peasant institutions (disarmament as the deprivation of all means, including moral and willpower, for waging the struggle (“debilitating”), which offered an alternative under the conditions of the creation of the Soviet image of a “new society”, a “new peasant”. A gradual elimination of institutions in the countryside that were an alternative to the Soviet ones created the prerequisites for the subjugation of the Ukrainian countryside during the period of the “Great Turning Point” of 1929 – 1933.

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