NON-PARTISAN PEASANTS’ CONFERENCES AS AN ATTEMPT TO RESIST TOTALITARIANISM IN UKRAINIAN VILLAGES OF THE SECOND HALF OF 20-IES OF XX CENTURY

Abstract

The article considers the issues of holding non-partisan peasant conferences in the Ukrainian village of the second half of the 1920s. The authors argue that these conferences were a kind of attempt to resist totalitarianism. It is stated that at these non-partisan peasant conferences the interests of the Ukrainian peasantry, which in principle did not correspond to the Bolshevik plans, were clearly expressed. However, the real threat of losing power pushed the new government to seek ways of reconciliation. The Bolsheviks, using various attempts to draw the majority of the peasantry to their side, not only used economic levers of influence, but also tried to resolve this issue in an ideological, propagandistic way. The Bolshevik idea of organizing non-partisan peasant conferences was one of the attempts to imitate democracy on the part of the Soviet regime. The article, based on the analysis of archival materials of reports on the results of peasant conferences, presents the real, including negative, attitude of the population to the policy of the Soviet government in the countryside. By the mid-1920s, when the first period of the NEP had contributed to the liberalization of socio-political and socio-economic relations in the Ukrainian village, the protest nature of peasant non-partisan conferences receded into the background. However, the process of "tightening the screws" on the peasantry, which began to "fall out" of the control of the Soviet regime, again intensified the growth of socio-political activity of peasants. There is a logical explanation for this. Successes in grain production as the main source of income for peasant farms contributed to their economic strengthening, but at the same time with the improvement of the economic situation of peasants, the Soviet government increased financial pressure on them, moreover in the context of industrialization since 1925. This economically unjustified pressure began to acquire obviously distorted forms. At non-partisan peasant conferences, the working peasantry did not advocate the annihilation of Soviet power, but that it should admit its mistakes, that middle peasants should not be considered kulaks, and lazy people should be forced to work and much more. The article argues that a number of command-and-control measures of the Soviet regime in the second half of the 1920s, including emergencies, led to external repression of the peasantry, and his rejection of both Soviet methods of agriculture and the regime’s attitude toward the village, far from the traditional peasant way of life, passed into the category of moral disobedience.