SOUTHERN UKRAINIAN AGRICULTURE DURING THE NEW ECONOMIC POLICY (1921 – 1927)

Abstract

This article highlights the role of the peasantry during the New Economic Policy in Southern Ukraine (1921–1927). During the two decades following the Communist Revolution, the grain basket of the Southern Ukraine endured a series of tumultuous upheavals–the civil war, foreign interventions, droughts, war communism, the NEP, and then the Stalin’s Great Purge with suppression of the kulak class of well-off farmers in the 1930s. One of the USSR’s richest agricultural regions was racked by famines that were especially severe in 1921-23 and during the Purge. The era of the NEP represented a brief respite in these two decades of despair.

The research draws on a rich variety of seldom-used archival documents housed in the Central State Archives of Supreme Bodies of Power and Government of Ukraine, and in the State Archives of the Mykolaiv regions. These archives include documents of the central and local Communist Parties, of individual policymakers, of economic institutions, and of official statistical bodies.

The research tasks were solved on a methodological basis, which included theoretical provisions that reflected the crucial role of the masses, especially the peasants, in history. It made it possible to conduct the research impartially, systematically and comprehensively, to get rid of schematism and subjectivism, as well as to cover historical events in their specific spatiotemporal characteristics, taking into account current trends in economic development.

The NEP experience demonstrates the resiliency of the peasantry in the Southern Ukraine as they rapidly adapted to a new legal and policing environment to expand private farming, output, cooperation, and a market economy. However, by the end of the 1920s, with a renewed policy of collectivization reversed these positive trends.