Political Identity under Invasion: Kherson Oblast in Summer 1941

According to official Soviet sources, the elaborate propaganda in the press, on the radio, and at meetings at Kherson's major industrial enterprises in the wake of Stalin's speech on 3 July produced the desired results-a high rate of voluntary enrollment in the recently created people'...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of Ukrainian studies 2005-07, Vol.30 (1), p.47
Main Author: Melnyk, Oleksandr
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Armed forces
Collaboration
Military personnel
Politics
Propaganda
Society
War
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Summary:According to official Soviet sources, the elaborate propaganda in the press, on the radio, and at meetings at Kherson's major industrial enterprises in the wake of Stalin's speech on 3 July produced the desired results-a high rate of voluntary enrollment in the recently created people's militia.15 The recruitment of army propagandists among party and Komsomol members also proceeded smoothly. According to A. Gusakov, a worker at the plant and a participant in the destruction battalion, by 13 August most of the equipment of the Petrovsky Plant and other large enterprises was disassembled and, despite the extreme shortage of transportation, shipped with a considerable number of plant employees and their family members to the rear.43 The question arises: why did the Soviets manage to relocate the industrial enterprises but not much of the valuable workforce to the east? [...]he commits the same mistake as the "totalitarians," attributing all manifestations of "anti-Soviet" behaviour, such as destruction of Communist party cards, exclusively to the legacy of the preceding decades (Hiroaki Kuromiya, Freedom and Terror in the Donbas: A Ukrainian-Russian Borderland, 1870s-1990s [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 263-6). According to Dementii BeIy, who conducted a series of oral interviews, when the marines dumped sunflower oil from tanks at the railway station, some locals attempted to scoop the oil from the ground, but the marines opened fire on them ("Khersonskaia starina," Nedvizhimost goroda, 15-31 March 1997).
ISSN:0228-1635