№1-2020-13
Tarasova Yu. A., Moiseeva T. A.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC SITUATION IN SYZRAN DISTRICT ON THE EVE OF FAMINE IN THE VOLGA REGION IN THE EARLY 1920s
The article is devoted to a detailed analysis of the everyday life of a provincial Soviet city on the eve and in the first year of famine in the Volga Region of the 20th century. The study of the problems of this disaster can reveal the essential characteristics of a complex, ambiguous relationship of the authorities to the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to reveal features of the socio-economic processes taking place in the region during this period and during the implementation of the New Economic Policy at the initial stage. The paper highlights and describes the characteristic features of the strategy of resistance of rural and urban population to forcible withdrawal of food and attraction to labor. The authors study the measure of understanding the consequences of drought and crop failure for Syzran County and the Volga region as a whole of the local leadership. It was found that the underestimation of the situation has become one of the prerequisites of the worst national disaster. The authors substantiate the idea that the actions of local authorities to overcome hunger, such as labor migration, an expedition for commodity exchange in the uninjured provinces, various forms of fundraising for the hungry were not always effective and sometimes showed very modest results of these activities.
This was reflected not only in the scale of the tragedy in the region, but also caused a huge number of victims.
Keywords: the surplus, the tax in kind, labor escaping, the sowing campaign, the New Economic Policy, famine in the Volga Region.
Syzran branch of Samara State University of Economics (Russia)
