EXPERIMENT OF CHILDREN AND PEDLITKI IN UKRAINE TO THE COMMUNIST TOTALITARIARY REGIME THAT ROCKED THE HOLDOMORT-GENOCIDE OF 1932–1933

Abstract

The article analyzes the precedents of the participation of Ukrainian children and teenagers in the resistance movement of Ukrainians to the Stalinist autocratic regime on the eve and during the Holodomor-genocide. The reasons for the involvement of children in the performances were characterized, and it was also clarified for what reasons parents tried to avoid the participation of their children in active forms of resistance.
Scientific novelty of the article. The issue of children’s participation in various forms of resistance was not specifically investigated in historiography. Based on the analysis of the historiographic work and available archival and published sources (including oral history), we found out the facts of the participation of children and teenagers in anti-communist demonstrations during 1930–1932, found out the forms and degree of childhood involvement in the Ukrainian resistance to communism regime
The purpose of this article is to analyze the context and content of the resistance of children and adolescents of the USSR to the policies of the communist regime during the Holodomor-genocide years. The tasks of the article are: analysis of precedents of children’s participation in peasant demonstrations that took place on the eve and during the Holodomor of 1932–1933, and a description of the forms of resistance in which children were involved.
Conclusions. Therefore, the children of Ukraine on the eve and during the Holodomor of 1932–1933 did not remain indifferent. Childhood was not uniform.
Descendants of communist activity, pioneers and former homeless people who were brought up in communist educational institutions, having passed the education of the «new man» quite often demonstrated their loyalty to the authorities and, distorting reality, glorified Stalin’s terror. Most of the children of Ukraine were from peasant families. As they could, they expressed protests against the shameful actions of disarmament, forced collectivization, and Russification carried out by the communist authorities. According to the tradition in Ukrainian society, parents tried to protect and secure their children and tried to minimize their participation in anti-communist demonstrations. However, the children, realizing the reasons for their parents’ wandering, still joined and expressed their own protest. The forms of resistance were different: from passive, manifested in the mutilation of portraits of leaders, refusal to participate in communist rallies and gatherings or join the ranks of pioneers, secretly visiting the church, to active: writing letters to communist leaders (even realizing that criticism of the authorities could end in arrest ), creating murals with poems critical of the Communists, joining women’s bagpipes. It should be noted that it is quite problematic to clearly distinguish the forms of resistance, because in a disturbed society, an ordinary meeting could turn into an armed uprising. However, indignation at the communist policy was an undeniable fact.
Since the autumn of 1932, the participation of children and teenagers in anti-government protests was recorded less and less. This is explained by the strengthening of the Holodomor, and children, as the most vulnerable category of the population, were among the first to feel the pangs of starvation. The Holodomor of 1932–1933 mutilated the psyche of Ukrainians, destroyed their national identity, and conditioned the indoctrination of the Ukrainian future for several generations.