Peasant Grain Production in UkrSSR in the Second Half of the 1920s: The Problem of State Dictate

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to highlight Ukrainian peasant grain production in the second half of the 1920s, to analyze the agrarian policy of the Soviet regime, which led to slow, destructive processes in agriculture.

The methodological basis of the research is the principles of historicism, objectivity, scientificity, multifactoriality and comprehensiveness. The application of problem-chronological, comparative-historical, statistical, logical-analytical, concrete-search methods contributed to the discovery of the essence and logic of the ambiguous social-political and socio-economic processes of the period under study.

Scientific novelty is determined by the involvement and elaboration of sources from the problem raised, a critical view of its understanding. The entire range of factors that determined the situation of agriculture in Soviet Ukraine in the second half of the 1920s was analyzed.

The main results of the study. A wide range of issues related to the development of grain production as the main source of income of Ukrainian peasant farms in the specified period is considered. The dynamics of the growth of the area of peasant sowings and the process of reducing the number of no-draft and no-remanence farms were analyzed. It has been found that the strengthening of commandadministrative pressure, the forced course towards industrialization caused not just negative, but destructive processes in the economic life of the Ukrainian peasantry. The study made it possible to establish that the Soviet authorities used the economic strengthening of Ukrainian grain producers from the mid-1920s in their own interests, increasing financial pressure on peasants with further devastating consequences for their farms for the Bolsheviks’ social experiment in the form of collective farms. The article systematically highlights positive and negative trends in grain production; the cause-and-effect relationships of relevant processes and phenomena in the policy of the Soviet government in the second half of the 1920s are analyzed and their consequences in the socio-economic plane are shown.