A PERSON IN THE SOVIET COORDINATE SYSTEM (BASED ON LETTERS FROM THE PERFORMERS OF THE GREAT TERROR IN 1937–1938 TO THE AUTHORITIES IN UKRAINE
Abstract
For a long time after the collapse of the USSR, nostalgia for the Soviet past was maintained in Ukraine with the help of various tools and technologies. The system has penetrated deeply into human existence. In the current realities of war, it is necessary to dispel the myths of Soviet life. The purpose of the article is to analyze the existence and functioning of the Soviet totalitarian political system, as part of the essence of man, on the territory of the USSR in the twentieth century. The author describes the conditions for the creation of a violent culture, proving that the Soviet system was implemented in various spheres of human life through various practices and rituals to influence human consciousness. The research methodology is based on a combination of general scientific (analysis, synthesis, generalisation) and special historical (historical-genetic, historical-typological, historical-systemic) methods with the principles of historicism, systematicity, scientificity and verification. The scientific novelty is that by analysing letters to the authorities from the perpetrators of the Great Terror of 1937-1938, the author traces the impact of the Soviet system on people. For the first time, the materials of letters from NKVD officers were used to characterise the processes of transformation of the human personality in the Soviet state. The Soviet political elite used several steps to form a new personality loyal to the regime. The first step was to kill the legal personality of a person, which, in addition to its duties, also has rights. The next task was to turn the person into a living corpse by killing the moral personality and limiting his or her path to individual escape. It was important to make the decisions of conscience ambiguous and questionable. The final step could be the destruction of not just a person's life, not just their physical destruction, but the denial of the very fact of their existence. As a result, the regime tried to destroy any trace of a person's own identity. Writing letters to the authorities, common in the USSR evidences of the destruction of human identity. As a rule, the authors of letters to the authorities tried to write in the language of the authorities they were addressing, creating a letter on behalf of their documentary personality that existed on paper.
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i:10.1177/0047244107074186
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