The history of the Ukrainian peasantry is filled with heroic and, to a greater extent, tragic pages, characterized by the struggle for political and national independence, for the right to free life, work in their own state. This publication is devoted to the situation of the Ukrainian peasantry during the period of «military communism» introduced by the Bolsheviks in order to establish Soviet power in the occupied Ukrainian territory.

The leader of the Russian Bolsheviks V. Lenin and his supporters of the doctrine of reforming agricultural production on the basis of class struggle, sought to eliminate the world-tested models of industrial development in a market economy.

The destruction of market relations led to the destruction of agricultural producers, their material interest in the results of labor. The Bolsheviks brought non-economic coercion to the fore. Violence and force, up to armed, methods and means were the basis of organized and managed by the totalitarian Soviet government social production. Coercive measures were especially widely used by the Bolsheviks against the peasantry. Rural producers of food, especially bread grown by hard labor, did not want to sell grain, food for money, which in the face of inflation, lost its purchasing power. In response, the Bolsheviks declared a food dictatorship, according to which the peasants were obliged to hand over so-called grain surpluses only at state prices. Market trade in bread was forbidden, which was considered speculation.

In their programmed documents, the Bolsheviks, according to their communist doctrine, promoted and tried to implement the idea of collectivization of agriculture, which was based on the thesis of the transition from small individual farms to collective farming. However, the idea of organizing collective farms was not supported by the vast majority of peasants who dreamed of farming on their land. The peasants were distrusted by the calls of the Bolshevik Party to abandon the desire to become owners of land and work as a rural proletarian in collective farms. The peasants believed that in these farms they would be state mercenaries.

In order to inflame the struggle between the peasantry, the seizure of food, bread from wealthy peasants, the Bolsheviks formed committees of the poor. They were tasked with stratifying the rural community, confiscating land, property, stock, and bread from the so-called «kulaks» and equating enterprising peasant workers with the rural poor. This was the basic idea of the Bolsheviks, socialism was to be built by the rural proletarians and the semi-proletarians, lumpens. Millions of real masters, the main producers of food, especially bread, were declared «enemies of the people», tried by «revolutionary courts», imprisoned for many years and shot. Tens of thousands of workers and military detachments were sent to Ukrainian villages to forcibly seize bread and food from the peasants in accordance with the Bolshevik food dictatorship. The peasants were forced to defend their lives, property with weapons in hand. The Bolsheviks ignited a real war against the peasantry, asserting totalitarian Soviet power by force of arms.

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