The Soviet Repressive Practices and Mass Terror during the 1920s (Based on Podіllia region)

Abstract

The purpose of the article is an attempt to analyze mass terror as the only acceptable method for the Bolsheviks to gain power and maintain it. The task is to understand the specifics of terror in Ukraine, in particular in Podillya. It is proposed to consider the history of the Soviet occupying power as typical of the behavior of the winner towards the defeated: «I terrorize because I have power and authority, because I can, I have not limits». The methodological basis of the research is the principles of scientificity, historicism, general scientific tools (analysis, synthesis, generalization). The analysis and interpretation of the Soviet regime is based on civilization-humanistic and socio-anthropological approaches. The scientific novelty of the work consists in an attempt to generalize the modern understanding of the Soviet regime as an occupation-colonial regime that won and took hold thanks to terror and mass repressions. In Ukraine, the Soviet penal system had a genocidal character and was directed against both the peasantry and nationally conscious categories of society. Conclusions. The Soviet system of power - from the armed seizure of power in 1917 to the overthrow of the regime in 1991 - was punitive and repressive in relation to society in terms of its ideology and political activity. It subjected various social strata and categories to violence with varying degrees of intensity depending on the characteristics of the historical period. The unlimited use of «revolutionary» violence against real and imagined opponents and rivals was a common feature of the Soviet-Bolshevik dictatorship, cynically legitimized as the «dictatorship of the proletariat». Mass terror and repression were the essence of Bolshevism as a whole, not just a tool of power structures. Soviet power is impossible without repression and terror. Terror had an all-absorbing (total) character, permeated all segments and spheres of social life and had a continuous character. The fight against internal and external «enemies of the people» was an artificial apologetic for the Bolsheviks' misanthropic program.