‘Cooperative Intelligentsia’ of the Ukrainian SSR: Process of Its Social Self-Sustainability Formation (the 1920s – the First Half of the 1930s)
Abstract
The purpose of the research paper is to find out the social affiliation of cooperative workers involved in the management of cooperative organizations and the field of intellectual work, based on data on their social identification and cultural and ethical features.
The scientific novelty of the results of the study is in the identification of social and cultural characteristics of the intelligentsia, which arose as a result of its participation in cooperative activity, and afterward ‘cooperative intelligentsia’ gained the opportunity to obtain the features of self-sustainable social class.
Conclusions. In the cooperative movement, there was a detachment of the intelligentsia, which played the role of heads of cooperative organizations, employees of their management apparatus, and on-staff multi-skilled specialists. They were called ‘cooperative intelligentsia’, ‘cooperative workers’, ‘public workers’, or ‘cooperators’. Public opinion distinguished ‘cooperators’ from the ‘cooperative population’ – the members of cooperative societies and other professional and social groups. The ‘cooperators’ were identified as an independent category of people engaged in organizational, management, and intellectual work in the field of cooperation. At the same time, among the ‘cooperative intelligentsia’, emerged their own social awareness and its representatives regarded themselves as a kind of social elite. The formation of such social and cultural type of intelligentsia began in the early 20th century and continued in the 1920s. The intellectual strata, peasantry, and industrial workers who joined cooperative life were the environment where the ‘cooperators’ appeared.
The historical time of ‘cooperative intelligentsia’ was short. Due to the filling of the cooperation’ head positions with the representatives of the party and Soviet bodies, as well as the power’s repressive policies, that social type of intelligentsia ceased to exist in the 1930s.
‘Cooperative intelligentsia’ should be considered as an intellectual and cultural elite that had fulfilled itself in the sphere of cooperation and the cooperative movement, and gained, as a result of such involvement, specific cultural, ideological, and social-behavioral features, among which were the ability to the public, organizational, and economic work among people, indifference to their interests, work in favor of the broad masses of the population, and dependence on the latter. Identification in society and self-identification of ‘cooperators’ showed their social self-sufficiency and the peculiar feature of cooperation, as a form of social and economic life, to give rise to a specific type of intellectual elite.
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