On the Historiography of the Stalinist Modernization of the Regional Peasant Society in the USSR (based on the materials of Mordovia)

Nad'kin Timofei Dmitrievich ORCID: 0000-0002-2677-8529 Doctor of History Professor, Department of National and Foreign History and Teaching Methods, Mordovian State Pedagogical University named after M. E. Evseviev 430007, Russia, Republic of Mordovia, Saransk, Studentskaya str., 11a ntd2006@yandex.ru Martynenko Aleksandr Valentinovich ORCID: 0000-0002-4701-6398 Doctor of History Professor, Department of National and Foreign History and Teaching Methods, Mordovian State Pedagogical University named after M. E. Evseviev 430007, Russia, Republic of Mordovia, Saransk, Studentskaya str., 11a arkanaddin@mail.ru

Mal'chenkov Denis Petrovich ORCID: 0000-0002-2100-0144 Lecturer, Department of Operational Investigative Activities, Voronezh Institute of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia 53 Patriots Ave., Voronezh, Voronezh region, 394065, Russia malchenkovdenis@yandex.ru

Today, the study of the "catching up" modernization of the Russian agrarian society of the pre-war decade is a dynamically developing area of Russian historical science. Thanks to the introduction into scientific circulation of a significant array of archival documents, their new reading, socio-economic and socio-cultural shifts in predominantly agrarian regions before the revolution are seen in a more voluminous and multifaceted way. 

The history of the multiethnic peasantry of Mordovia during the first five-year plans as an integral part of the above-mentioned modernization attracted research interest from historians, whose works formed a separate direction in the historiography of the specified subject of the Russian Federation.

For the first time, the problem of the consequences of Stalin's agrarian modernization for the peasant society of the Mordovian ASSR, in relation to the first post-war years, was raised in his monographic study by S. S. Ivashkin ^[9], who introduced extensive archival and statistical material into scientific circulation. It is this extensive empirical base that made the work of this author quite valuable in informative terms, despite its pronounced (and, let us add, inevitable in the conditions of that era) ideological character.

M. V. Ageev's monographic study ^[3], written at the turn of the 1950s - 1960s, during the Khrushchev thaw, traces the process of "victory of the collective farm system" in the Mordovian ASSR, that is, reveals the features of Stalin's agrarian modernization, including its technological aspects, in relation to the region under consideration.

It should be noted that the works of S. S. Ivashkin and M. V. Ageev, despite their obvious shortcomings, were the only monographic works on the agrarian history of Mordovia of the pre-war period until the second half of the 1980s.

Some aspects of the pre-war modernization of the village of Mordovia were considered in the works of I. E. Avtaykin on the development of the periodical press ^[2], M. S. Bukin on the problems of national-state construction ^[6], V. A. Balashov on the culture and life of the Mordovian collective farm village ^[4]. The rapid liberalization of the socio-political climate in the country of the notorious era of "Gorbachev's perestroika" gave birth to new interpretations of the topic under consideration in the articles by A. A. Krasnikov ^[10] and L. G. Filatov ^[18].

In 1996, a monograph by historian V. K. Abramov "The Mordovian People (1897-1939)" was published, in which three chapters are thematically related to Stalin's agrarian modernization ^[1]. Thanks to this research, new archival sources, previously unknown to the general reader, were introduced into scientific circulation. At the same time, the author's statements about hundreds of thousands of victims among Mordovian peasants, about the destruction of the peasant elite of Mordovian nationality, etc., may be some kind of exaggeration. On the other hand, it is necessary to unequivocally agree with V. K. Abramov that during the dekulakization, a policy of artificially inciting social conflicts was carried out in the agrarian society of Mordovia of that period.

Since the 1990s, a whole community of scientists has been forming in the Republic of Mordovia (RM), who have made a very important contribution to the development and understanding of the issues under consideration.

Thus, O. I. Mariskin in his works presented the micro-level of Stalin's agrarian modernization in the Middle Volga region, including Mordovia ^[11].

Historian A. P. Soldatkin revealed the role and specifics of the activities of the Soviet and party organs of the Mordovian ASSR in the analyzed processes of the 1930s ^{[16; 17]}, and also on the basis of the extracted archival data, actually made the famine in Mordovia 1937-1939 public knowledge. The latter seems to the authors of this article extremely important for debunking the “new Ukrainian mythology of the Holodomor”, which is allegedly the exclusive prerogative of the Ukrainian people as some kind of exceptional victim of social genocide.

Almost a quarter of a century of painstaking long-term work with archival sources is presented in T. D. Nagkin's monograph "Stalin's agrarian policy and the peasantry of Mordovia" ^[13]. The book focuses on the analysis of the economic and social consequences of the pre-war modernization of agriculture, the implementation of repressive policies in the 1930s. (dekulakization, "The Great Terror of 1937-1938"), the situation of the peasantry of the autonomous Republic during the Great Patriotic War, and the new trials that befell the peasantry of Mordovia during the post-war restoration of the national economy are also considered.

T. D. Nagkin, referring to the pre-war modernization of agriculture, argues about the prevalence of negative and destructive phenomena in peasant society ^[12].  However, this should not be limited to describing the pre-war period, because there were also noticeable changes in the culture and the growth of education of the rural population.

V. A. Yurchenkov, an outstanding specialist in the regional history of Mordovia, made his contribution to the study of the issues under consideration ^[19], who, without denying the consequences that T. D. Nagkin writes about, put positive consequences at the forefront, especially the successes of technical modernization of agriculture.

A separate direction of the regional historiography of Stalin's agrarian modernization is the study of the socio-cultural transformation of the Tatar population of the MASSR of the period under consideration.

The first works related to the topic of educational and cultural-educational activities in the Tatar settlements of Mordovia appeared in the late 1920s. In particular, it was the work of P. T. Polibitsyn "Ten years of economic and cultural-social construction of the Penza province" ^[14], in which one of the chapters was devoted to the public education of the Penza province and general data on the increase in literacy, the development of the school network, the number of reading rooms, educational centers, including among the Tatars of the region.

The work on the history of the origin, settlement and language of the Tatar population of Mordovia, written by the outstanding orientalist M. G. Safargaliev ^[15], states the further consolidation of the multinational Soviet people, despite the craving of national republics to preserve cultural identity. The scientist speaks negatively about the "bourgeois nationalists" who tried to divide a single people – the Kazan Tatars and the Mishar Tatars and concluded that "with the comprehensive development of the Tatar socialist nation, local peculiarities in language, way of life and other areas of culture disappear," as well as the departure of the name "mishari" into legends.

Thus, in the historiography of the Soviet period, the topic of the socio-cultural development of the Tatars of Mordovia was touched upon only sporadically, in generalized studies, and was distinguished at the same time by its ideologization.

In post-Soviet regional historiography, A. I. Belkin's articles are of great interest [see, for example: 5], in which the author, using the example of Orthodox and Muslim cults on the territory of Soviet Mordovia, touches on the Stalinist period, when state-confessional relations were characterized by large-scale repressions against the clergy and believers, which during the war were replaced by a temporary period of warming, which significantly revived the life of religious communities. At the same time, having made a step towards believers, the state continued to actively interfere in the activities of confessions, and a number of prohibitions continued to operate against cults. A. I. Belkin is one of the first researchers of Mordovia, who in his publications examined the history of the Muslim community of the republic during the Soviet period. It is necessary to note other works of the aforementioned researcher, written by him in the second half of the 2000s - 2010s. A. I. Belkin comes to the conclusion that, despite the anti–religious campaign, persecution and destruction of the clergy in the late 1920s - 1930s, difficulties with the registration of the cult, the level of religiosity among the Tatars of Mordovia remained high. And some softening of anti-religious legislation during the war years helped to strengthen the position of Islam, as a result of which two mosques began to operate legally in Mordovia.

Historian R. R. Yusupov in his dissertation research ^[20] traces the process of displacement of the religious (Islamic) component not only from different spheres of life of the Tatar population, but also public consciousness; shortcomings in the implementation of universal education, which were reduced to achieving, first of all, quantitative indicators, not qualitative; poor quality of teacher training from Tatars-mishars, as well as a shortage of specialists with higher education, etc. 

Researcher A. P. Evdokimov ^{[7; 8]} analyzed in some detail and in detail the problem of transformation of the social behavior of the multinational peasantry of Mordovia of the specified period, considering the most diverse aspects of the radical reforms carried out during the first five-year plans.

Despite the seemingly increased attention to the pre-war modernization of peasant society in the regional dimension in the post-Soviet period, the problem of the comparative efficiency of collective and state farm production, the achievements of individual collective farms and state farms in terms of agricultural production growth, the implementation of plans for the mechanization of agricultural production against the background of a decrease in the working livestock, the solution of the problem providing the growing urban population with food. Of particular interest are the changes in the public mood of the peasant society in connection, on the one hand, with the unfolding struggle against religion, and on the other – the increase in literacy and the increase in the general cultural level of the population.

All these problems can become the subject of separate scientific research in the context of "catching up" modernization, which covered the economy and socio-cultural sphere of the Soviet Union and the countries of the East looking at it in the interwar period.