«The Great Turning Point»: collectivisation and Holodomor in Ukraine in the dimension of relations between the government and the peasantry

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to analyze the reasons for the communist authorities’ brutal implementation of the collectivization
and dispossession policy and its terrible demographic and humanitarian consequences in Ukraine.
Scientific novelty: a set of theoretical and practical factors is highlighted that determined the authorities’ anti-human
policy towards the Ukrainian peasantry in the late 1920s and early 1930s and led to profound socio-economic and humanitarian
changes. The forms and methods of implementing collectivization in the republic are considered. The attitude of the peasants
to collectivization is highlighted, a wide range of passive and active forms of their peaceful and armed struggle against the
authorities’ intentions to change their socio-economic status is considered. The reasons for the defeat of the peasantry are analyzed.
They lie in the plane of theoretical provisions that guided the Bolshevik Party in its relations with the peasantry. These
provisions were formulated by the founders of Marxism, who defined the peasantry as a reactionary class that has no future and
proposed involving its economic and human potential in building a new system. Lenin and his associates took these dogmas as
a basis and consolidated them in the minds of the members of their party. Based on the theoretical provisions of Marxism about
the hostility of the peasantry to the interests of the working class and the experience of the Civil war and Ukrainian liberation
struggles, in which entire peasant armies participated, the Bolshevik government, upon establishing its regime in the republic,
punished with increased cruelty any manifestations of peasant discontent, considering them a threat to its existence. On a
significant scale, it removed from the peasant environment its most charismatic element, capable of organizing resistance, and
weapons. In this way, it deprived it of the proper organizational, human, and armed potential, and the willpower to organize a
significant struggle.
Conclusion. When the policy of forced collectivization of the Ukrainian countryside began to be implemented, it, despite
mass demonstrations and the use of a wide range of forms and methods of resistance, was no longer able to resist it. As a result, a serious socio-economic breakdown occurred. Its consequences: the loss of a self-sufficient peasant-owner, a bearer of experience in agricultural production and the spiritual culture of the nation, the closure of many aspects of the production, social, and cultural life of the village to bureaucratic structures controlled by the state and the communist party, the loss of a free peasant, the formation of a slave-laborer. The “Great Breakthrough” was programmed at the very beginning of the formation of the communist doctrine.