On the Historiography of the Stalinist Modernization of the Regional Peasant Society in the USSR (based on the materials of Mordovia)

The object of the study is the historiographical aspects of the modernization of the peasant society of Russia during Stalinism, which is usually identified with the continuous collectivization and dispossession of the late 1920s – early 1930s. The subject of the study is the corpus of scientific works on Stalinist agrarian modernization in the Mordovian region during the first five-year plans, the first of which appeared in the second half of the 1950s, analyzed taking into account the change of ideological paradigms in Russian historical science in the early 1990s. Within the framework of this study, the authors tried to trace the transformation of assessments of Stalin's agrarian modernization in the scientific community of regional historians on the historiographical material of Mordovia. The main conclusions of this study concern sufficiently high degree of elaboration of the issues under consideration in the regional historiography of the Republic of Mordovia. At the same time, despite the growing attention to the pre-war agrarian modernization in the post-Soviet period, a number of problematic issues have been identified that require more in-depth study. Among them: the economic efficiency of collective farms and state farms organized in the late 1920s – the first half of the 1930s, the degree of mechanization of agricultural production, solving the problem of providing the growing urban population with food, changes in the socio-cultural appearance and public attitudes of the multinational and multi-confessional peasantry of the Mordovian Region.

peasant society, Stalinist agrarian modernization, collectivization, dispossession, historiography, Mordovia, interwar period, public education, socio-cultural development, anti-religious struggle