Хід колективізації в Ізмаїльській області у 1946–1947 роках (за матеріалами газети Татарбунарського району «Знамя Совєтов»)

Abstract

The Soviet authorities began building collective farms in Ukrainian Danube almost immediately after the region joined the USSR in 1940. According to Soviet authorities, almost 215 collective farms were organized in the region before the Soviet-German war. Rebuilding of the collective farms damaged during the war and the creation of the new ones started in late 1944, but over the next few years this process was very slow. This, on the one hand, can be explained by the difficulties of the reconstruction period, when all the efforts were aimed to restore the national post war economy; and on the other hand, the local peasants, who were accustomed to running a farm independently and were wary of proposals from the new (Soviet) government, displayed cautiousness. In addition, the famine of 1946-1947 hit the territory of the Ukrainian Danube territories the hardest, which also added to the caution of the peasants in the transfer of their land to the artels. Only since 1946, the Communists began more or less active work to carry out collectivization in the region. The newspaper «Znamia Sovetov», was the body of the Tatarbunary District Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine and the Tatarbunary Council of Workers' Deputies. The materials of this newspaper, published since 1945, made it possible to analyze the course of collectivization in the area and its reflection in the columns of the specified edition. The main conclusions reached by the author who analyzed the materials of the newspaper are as follows. Firstly, in the first half of 1946, collectivization in the Tatarbunary district was very slow: by the middle of that year, there were only seven collective farms there. Secondly, the pace of collectivization speeded up in the second half of 1946, when the authorities actually forced peasants to join the collective farms. But in the newspapers these facts were presented as voluntary decisions of individual peasants. Third, by the end of 1947, collectivization in the Danube region had not been completed yet, as more than 20% of peasant farms (in the Tatarbunary district) remained individual. Fourth, the newspaper «Znamia Sovetov» clearly fulfilled the tasks of the «mouthpiece» of the communist government. There was practical absence of critical materials, the articles avoided mentioning the famine and difficulties of collectivization. The published materials were mostly performed in the spirit of «hurray-patriotism». Fifth, the newspaper materials contained information that did not correspond to the official statistics. Therefore, in the article we used the archival data to confirm or refute the information.