IVAN SEMENOVICH KUZNETSOV IN THE CONTEXT OF THREE MYTHOLOGIES OF COLLECTIVIZATION

Abstract

The article considers scientific works of the Russian historian I.S. Kuznetsov in the context of three historical approaches to assessing collectivization: 1) the Soviet official approach of the 1960-1980s; 2) the ideology of the so called “village writers”; 3) the post-Soviet interpretation of collectivization. Kuznetsov is rightly called a pioneer of the study of the Soviet peasantry’s social psychology. The author argues that Kuznetsov as a scientist was greatly influenced by the works of B.F. Porshnev, N.Ya. Guschin, V.P. Danilov. His PhD thesis basically corresponded to the official Soviet model of interpreting collectivization but later his views on it seriously changed. In the book Social Psychology of the Siberian Peasantry in the 1920s, he proposed his own theory of the prerequisites of the “great change”, in particular focusing on numerous economic, political, and social-cultural conflicts among the peasantry on the eve of collectivization. Such an approach was very different from the mainstream interpretations of collectivization in the post-Soviet science. Thus, when developing his ideas in the 1990s, Kuznetsov actually presented a set of counter-arguments to the dominant theory of collectivization. At that time his ideas were ignored by the scientific community but today they attract its attention.