Khodin S.N. Transformational Processes in Belarusian Villages at the Turn of the 1920s–1930s

Abstract: The article analyzes the reasons for the changes in the agricultural policy of the Bolsheviks towards Belarus at the turn of the 1920s–1930s. The author examines the direction and content of the transformational processes in the social sphere and in the economic behavior of the Belarusian peasantry. Furthermore, the development tendencies of the individual peasant household are identified. The author looks at the particularities of the marker behavior of the Belarusian peasantry as a factor in the closure of the New Economic Policy. The article presents an analysis of the dynamics of collectivization in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, forms, aims and results of Dekulakization. The author also explains the demographic losses resulting from the famine that hit Belarusian villages in 1929–1933. On the basis of a comparative study the author analyzes the dynamics and content of the socio-political transformations of Belarus at the turn of the 1920s–1930s, its specifics in comparison to other republics of the USSR. The historical-genetic method has allowed to trace the origins of the socio-economic contradictions in the Belarusian villages at the turn of the 1920s–1930s and their consequences. On the basis of a structural-functional analysis the author identifies the direction of the transformative processes in the Belarusian villages during the inter-war period. The author consequently comes to the conclusion that the individual development of peasant households during the second half on the 1920s came against significant difficulties, demonstrated above all in the decrease of the marketability of agricultural production. If individual peasant households revealed the tendency of an increased consumption, then through the kolkhoz system the part of bread production that was essential to the survival of peasant families was pumped out. This led to a mass famine in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic and became one of the essential reasons for the slower growth in the population number during the first half of the 1930s. In 1933 (for the first time since the end of the First World War and the civil war) there was a decrease in the population number in the BSSR. In its survival strategy the Belarusian peasantry demonstrated a solidarity that was not dictated by party affiliation or social hierarchy. The development of education and an increase in the number of people from villages going to universities in the 1920s contributed to an increase in pro-peasant Belarusian sentiments, which among other factors determined a series of political processes in Belarus at the turn of the 1920s–1930s.

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