Young People Mobilizing for Participation in Communistic Transformations in Rural Areas During the Years of the Collectivization and Holodomor

Abstract

Abstract. The purpose of this study is to analyze the participation of students and teachers of Ukrainian higher education institutions in the Soviet transformations in the countryside and outline their role in organizing the artificial famine. The research methodology is based on the principles of historicism, scientificality, interdisciplinarity and anthropocentrism. To solve the problem, the method of socio-cultural analysis is used, as well as traditional concrete-scientific methods: historical-genetic, problemchronological, comparative and typological. The scientific novelty. The article analyzes participation of students and professors of Ukrainian higher education institutions in the countryside during the years of collectivization and the Holodomor. The research is based on a wide range of sources, among which a special place belongs to ego-documents: diaries, letters to the authorities, unpublished memoirs. Strategies for student behavior regarding the implementation of the decisions on participation in collectivization, collection of grain for the state grain stockpile and harvesting campaigns and the forms of their protests are highlighted. It is identified that a significant number of students were psychologically not prepared to carry out this work, therefore, they refused to go to the villages, fled from there, wrote letters to the authorities criticizing the party’s policy in the countryside. An extreme form of protests was suicide. The types of punishment that were used for students who refused to work in the countryside are identified. The attitude of students and teachers towards peasants, their relations are revealed, as well as their reflection on the situation in Ukrainian villages and on the everyday life of rural party activists and their families in the spring and summer of 1933. Conclusions. The analysis of the students’ participation in collectivization, sowing, collection of grain and crop harvesting campaigns shows their significant role in carrying out these activities. The high school was transformed into an inexhaustible source of a constant supply of human resources for local Soviet structures, for replenishing the brigades of collectivists and liquidators of numerous gaps of Soviet construction.