Voluntary Agricultural Societies in the Context of the Sociocultural Transformation and Etatisation of the Legal and Political System of the Soviet State

The research focuses on the place and role of public organizations in Soviet Russia in the 1920s. The empirical basis of the research is archival materials and normative legal acts on the activities of agricultural societies. The author notes that agricultural societies, like other voluntary societies, were liquidated in the late 1920s. This circumstance allows concluding that all the processes that took place with other public organizations at this time were reflected in the functioning of agricultural societies. From 1917 to the early 1920s, pre-revolutionary agricultural societies were involved in the work of Soviet bodies. In 1922, the NKVD began to register agricultural societies. In 1923, an attempt was made to provide special legal regulation of their activities. Placing agricultural societies in a separate category of public organizations, in fact, continued the pre-revolutionary tradition since these societies again received separate legal regulation. However, this approach was soon abandoned, and agricultural societies were again subject to general regulation. In the late 1920s, the process of Sovietization of the public sector began. The reasons for the liquidation of agricultural societies were: poor cultural work; poor financial condition; lack of all-Russian coverage, and others. Similar reasons for the closure were contained in other resolutions on the closure of public organizations of this period. Important in this time is the general attitude of the Soviet government to establish control over agriculture. The creation of local land departments, the Michurin Movement, propaganda work in the village, collectivization - all these activities displaced the public initiative. The state and the party aspired to the sole leadership of agriculture. Thus, the liquidation of agricultural organizations became a reflection of two interrelated processes. On the one hand, it was a process of suppressing civil initiative and identifying state and party interests with public ones. On the other hand, it was the process of building an administrative and command management system in agriculture. For this reason, peasants lost creativity in their work and their interest in the result. Agricultural societies lost their target audience: the initiative peasant. Therefore, in the conditions of socio-cultural transformation and etatisation of the legal and political system of the Soviet state, voluntary agricultural societies were simply not needed.

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