«Ukaznyky» of 1948 in the Vinnytsia Region

Abstract

The paper analyzes the implementation of the Decree of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium “On the banishment of individuals, who evade work in the collective farms and lead an antisocial parasitic lifestyle, from the territory of the Ukrainian SSR” of February 21, 1948  and the official Order No. 446 in Vinnytsia Region. It describes the impact of the regime’s punitive policy regarding the collective farm peasantry and the methods of forced banishment of the “Ukaznyky (banished farmers)” to other regions. The research methodology is based on the combination of general scientific (abstraction, analysis, synthesis, generalization) and special-historical (historical and critical, historical and systemic, concrete and problematic, quantitative) methods with the principles of historicism, consistency, scientific accuracy and verification. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the fact that the author, on the basis of new archival documents, has analyzed the implementation of the Decree of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium of February 21, 1948 in Vinnytsia Region and revealed the consequences of this policy introduction for farmers and collective farms.  Conclusions. Punitive methods against those peasants who did not want to work on collective farms confirmed the permanence of the Stalinist regime’s violence towards the majority of the country's population. In the absence of motivation for productive labor in collective farms, the USSR leaders adopted a decision to threaten the villagers by forced exile to the remote areas of the Russian Federation unless they agreed to work on collective farms. Such a policy did not lead to qualitative changes, positive for the regime, and didn’t help to improve the attitude of collective farmers to the unpaid “socially useful work” for the state.