ПРОВЕДЕННЯ ОПЕРАЦІЇ З ВИСЕЛЕННЯ «КУРКУЛІВ» В ОДЕСЬКІЙ ОКРУЗІ У ЛЮТОМУ 1930 Р.

Abstract

The article examines the operation for evicting the «kurkuls» in the Odesa district, which was carried out over several days in February 1930. This eviction of wealthy peasants was carried out as part of a campaign of dekulakization or elimination of the kurkuls as a class, which in turn was part of the implementation of continuous collectivization policy. During February 18-24, 1930, 1293 families consisting of 5551 people were evicted from the Odesa district, including 2451 men, 2246 women, and 854 children. Lists of «kurkul farms» whose owners were evicted to the North were compiled by district executive committees on the basis of decisions of collective farmers' meetings, meetings of the farmhands and poor, meetings of committees of poor peasants, and approved by district executive committees. The eviction was carried out by the local party, Komsomol, labor and peasant activists. The operation to evict the «kurkuls» in Odesa district went off without any problems for the authorities. Of course, some villagers resisted, and they were physically assaulted. But soon illegal meetings of peasants began to take place in the villages, where petitions to the authorities were adopted for the «return of the expelled “kurkuls». Particularly offensive to the authorities was the fact that village activists, collective farmers, Komsomol members, etc., who had previously been involved in operations to evict wealthy villagers, took an active part in these meetings. The villagers' demands to the authorities for the return of their fellow villagers were caused by the fact that they could not accept the fact that the evictees were on the verge of survival, that they were starving, that children were suffering from high mortality rates. But these petitions had no effect on the authorities, in other words, there was no question of any return from exile. Of course, there were cases when exiled peasants returned to their native land on their own. Such persons were then arrested and deported to the North in accordance with the decisions of the board of the State Political Administration of the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (GPU of the USSR). The same procedure was used to expel those who resisted eviction by the authorities. Those peasants who returned home without permission were imprisoned in a concentration camp a few years later.