Narrative Framings of Individual Agency: Life Stories of Soviet Farming in Ukraine

Abstract

ABSTRACT Over the course of two years (2008-2010), 170 former Soviet collective farmers in eleven different regions of Ukraine shared their life stories with the researchers who worked on the project, Oral History of Decollectivization in Ukraine. Since the project utilized the in-depth life-story interviewing method, gathered accounts shed much light on how former collective farmers of Ukraine navigated their lives and circumstances in Soviet times. As a result, the project contains a rich array of villagers’ reminiscences of how, during their lives in collective farms, they dealt with local power relations and what sense of agency they remember they exercised in their adult years as kolhospnyks (collective farm workers). These reminiscences focus on the period from the 1970s through the mid-1990s (the latter being the last decade of the collective farming system before it finally collapsed in 1999). Realizing that in their life stories villagers were actively asserting themselves as active agents of their lives still in the collective farming system, I explore in this article the narrative means with which they positioned themselves as such. More specifically, I discuss the relationship between the sense of agency and the chosen forms of narration; to position themselves as endowed with agency, the narrators most commonly turned to storytelling and narrative replays of past conflicts. I also touch here upon broader implications of my research findings, in the context of recent historical memory negotiations in prewar Ukraine and assertions of victimhood as the primary social state of the Soviet Ukrainian collective farmers.