Circumstances of Formation and Functioning of Twenty-Five-Thousanders as a “Strike” Mobilization Group During the Famine-Genocide of Ukrainians in 1932–1933

Abstract

The article analyzes the circumstances of formation and activity of twenty-five-thousanders as a “strike” mobilization group. These people were sent by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (CC AUCP(b)) to Ukraine to facilitate collectivization and dekulakization, which in fact meant committing the Famine-Genocide to Ukrainians in 1932–1933. The methodology of the study is based on the principles of the system approach to the analysis of the twenty-five-thousanders’ group with its structural, functional, role, and behavioral changes, and also the historical-comparative and problem-chronological methods. The research emphasizes that in the process of organizational, controlling, and propagandistic work with the local population, twenty-five-thousanders showed full incompetence and conflict-generating behavior, had no practical experience in mass organization of collective farms, and focused on implementing the “anti-kulak operation”. It is proven that to compensate for such lack of experience, the “strike” mobilization groups used their privileges and turned themselves into a universal personnel force whose potential did not correspond to the assigned powers, into ideologically “correct-minded” executors of the CC AUCP(b)’s directives aimed at committing the Famine-Genocide to Ukrainians. It is argued that the repressive, punitive, and mobilizing potential of the twenty-five-thousanders actually exhausted itself in 1933, when 85% of farms were collectivized. According to the contemporary data, during the whole period of dekulakization, actively supported by the twenty-five-thousanders, 1.5 to 2 million Ukrainians were exiled from Ukraine to Siberia and northern regions of Russia, and 300 to 500 thousand people were shot on sight as “kulaks”.