ORAL HISTORY OF UKRAINIAN PEASANT CULTURE 1920–1930

In 1993–1995, a group of ten Ukrainian researchers of the NGO “Center for Oral History and Culture” under the leadership of Dr. William Noll conducted a large-scale study of the transformation of civil society in villages of Ukraine, which occurred during the forced and aggressive Soviet collectivization campaign and the Holodomor of 1932-1933.

The goal of the project was to collect information about the life of the Ukrainian village before, during, and after collectivization. Using a questionnaire designed by Noll with input from other researchers, they recorded on cassette tapes over 420 interviews with elderly villagers in central and eastern regions of Ukraine. The interviews serve as a primary source, literally the voices of now long-deceased witnesses, for the analysis of dramatic socio-cultural changes from the1920s to the 1930s.

Selected interviews from this project (about one fourth of all recorded) were first presented in William Noll’s monograph, originally published in Ukrainian, Трансформація громадянського суспільства. Усна історія української селянської культури 1920-1930 (Kyiv: RODOVID, 1999). The interviews can be seen as living voices of those witnesses who experienced great changes in Ukraine, and a source for many domestic and Western researchers, documentarians, and historians.

In 2023, the English version of this publication was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press (Canada) – The Transformation of Civil Society: An Oral History of Ukrainian Peasant Culture, 1920s to 1930s.

Research regions: Kharkiv, Sumy, Poltava, Cherkasy, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Vinnytsia
Researchers: William Knoll, Valentina Borysenko, Larisa Novikova, Vira Zaichenko, Halyna Kornienko, Mykola Kornienko, Antonina Palagnyuk, Lidia Likhach, Vladyslav Paskalenko, archivist Serhiy Kryvenko.

For the first time, all the saved interviews are presented on the online platform “Great Transformations”.