Disabled People of Great Patriotic War in Post-War Ukraine 1945-1950
Abstract
The purpose of the paper is to highlight the living conditions of disabled people of the Great Patriotic War in post-war Ukraine, which were resulted from certain measures for the social protection of that social group, implemented by the party-government leadership of the republic.
The scientific novelty is in the fact that the study focuses on manifestations of discrimination by the authorities against certain groups of the social community of disabled front-line soldiers in the Ukrainian SSR.
Conclusions. The process of legal registration of the social group ‘invalids of the Great Patriotic War’ in the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR began in 1940 and continued until the end of the Second World War. The disabled of the Soviet-German War were legally separated from all social groups of the social security system and had a number of rights and privileges. At the same time, the practice of implementing the policy of the disabled WWII soldiers’ social protection by the party-government leadership of the USSR and Ukrainian SSR testified to a general tendency to ignore those rights and privileges.
The facts of the encroachment of the highest-ranking Communist party and government of the USSR and Ukraine representatives upon the process of determining the degree of loss of labor capacity of disabled veterans with the aim of reducing expenses for supporting their incomes are found out. The reasons for such actions of the authorities are analyzed. The dependence of the social protection of the war disabled on the ideological guidelines of the communist state as well as the command-administrative system of managing the economy and social policy is revealed. Disabled WWII soldiers who lived in the villages were discriminated against as well. They were paid a smaller pension, were not given food stamps for a guaranteed supply of bread, and were not exempted from taxes in kind in the form of harvesting agricultural products. It was discrimination on social grounds.
The administrative and coercive character of the solution to the problem of employment of disabled WWII soldiers in post-war Ukraine is proven. The paper shows the facts of discrimination against disabled war veterans with severe injuries who tried to survive on their own in hard living conditions, engaging in petty trade or begging. Authorities deprived them of freedom of movement, freedom of choice of occupation, and even personal freedom, forcibly sending them to specialized institutions. The top officials of the republic were also involved in that.
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