Women’s Experience of Participation in the Sovietisation Process in Ukrainian Villages in the 1920s and 1940s in Terms of Regional Peculiarities
Women’s Experience of Participation in the Sovietisation Process in Ukrainian Villages in the 1920s and 1940s in Terms of Regional Peculiarities

Summary/Abstract: The article focuses on analysis of gender aspects of the Bolshevik authorities’ state policy during the Sovietisation process of the Ukrainian regions immediately after the October Revolution in the 1920s, and of the Western regions of Ukraine in the first postwar years. The main forms and content of public and political activities of female peasants were researched by the comparative method. The Soviet government initiated different activities to involve women in all spheres oflife. It was caused, on the one hand, by the necessity of their labor mobilisation in a difficult demographic situation, the expansion of the social base of support for the Bolshevik Party and, on the other hand, it promoted the USSR’s role in the international arena. In terms of the implementation of the policy of gender equality proclaimed by the Bolsheviks, the so-called “Zhenotdely” were created in Russia in 1919. The experience of their activities was transferred to Ukraine in the 1920s and, after more than a decade’s pause, it was implemented in the western regions of Ukraine. Due to the lack of alternative civil society institutions, local “Zhenotdely” partially took over their functions and ran a number of important social spheres. Since the initiative to create “Zhenotdely” was not directed “from below” but “from above” and their activities were fully controlled by the relevant Committees of the CP(b)U, these organisations ipso facto could not reflect the interests of civil society. Generally, the implementation of state gender policy in the Ukrainian regions during the period given was carried out in terms of the so-called socialist transformations and was aimed at establishing and legitimising Soviet power there.

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