Stasiuk O. The deformation of Ukrainian traditional culture at the end of 1920s and the beginning of 1930s

The dissertation is dedicated to the complex research of the deformation processes of Ukrainian traditional culture at the end of 1920s and the beginning of 1930s. This is the first general and complex research of Ukrainian traditional culture in the period of exhausting people by hunger. The author had analyzed the state and the character of sources and determined the level of the research about the topic in Ukrainian and foreign historiography. Historiographical analysis proved that the existing sources only partly refer to the question of Ukrainian traditional culture deformation. It is ascertained that the deformation of Ukrainian traditional culture was caused by many different reasons: the upheavals that peasants had to go through at the time. It proved to be the beginning of active devastation process of traditional way of Ukrainian peasants' life. The new public unities and their influence upon the traditional law of Ukrainian peasantry were scrutinized. The harmful separation of peasants withtheir private individual farms to forcedly transform them into collective farmers was explored. The influence of political factors toward people's calendar rites was explored. It was argued that at the end of 1920s and the beginning of 1930s Soviet regime had undertaken a series of anti-Christmas and anti-Easter campaigns with the aim to extirpate the "old culture" and to impose the "new Soviet culture". The status of people's crafts in the end of 1920s and the beginning of 1930s was studied. It should be underlined that all the activities of Soviet regime, including the annihilating of the most hard-working stratum of Ukrainians, namely artisans, handicraftsmen and village intelligentsia were made with the aim to destroy traditional Ukrainian culture and to rob the ethno environment of spiritual vitality.