Resettlement Policy of the Soviet Government in the UkrSSR in the 1920s

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to give an objective assessment of both the resettlement policy of the Soviet state and the practice of its implementation in Ukraine, to establish the stages of this policy, the causes of resettlement, their scale, the state and peculiarities of the organisation of resettlement affairs in the 1920s, and to show it as a period and a prerequisite for forced mass resettlement in the following years. The scientific novelty of the research results lies in a new assessment of the resettlement policy of the Soviet authorities in the 1920s, the determination of the stages and principles of resettlement, the clarification of the factors that prompted the Ukrainian peasantry to change their place of residence, and the proof of the inability of the state authorities to establish an appropriate social – economic policy and solving the issue of agrarian overpopulation. The article shows the use of the resettlement organised by the Soviet authorities to clear the border strip of “socially dangerous” elements. It is proved that the general line of the resettlement policy of the Soviet authorities in the 1920s was to replace spontaneous migrations with purposeful, planned and regulated measures, with a gradual transition to mass deportations. Conclusions. The article is devoted to one of the important socio-economic problems of the history of the Soviet period – the resettlement policy of the Bolshevik government in the 1920s, which has not lost its relevance even today. Various aspects of resettlement from Ukraine in the 1920s remain understudied to this day. In this article, the problems of the resettlement of peasants in the period of the 1920s from the largest agrarian region of the USSR – Ukraine, are investigated on the basis of specific historical material, using the achievements of historiography and documents of the central archival institutions of the higher authorities and administration of Ukraine and the Russian Federation. Features of state policy, material and organisational capabilities of the resettlement case, causes, scales and difficulties of resettlement are shown.

Keywords

• ukrssr, rsfsr, ussr, people’s commissariat for land affairs, peasantry, resettlement, soviet government, colonisation fund