R. Oryshchenko, PhD Student

Bohdan Khmelnytsky National University of Cherkasy

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17721/1728-2640.2018.139.11

RELIGIOUSNESS AS A FACTOR OF MODERN TRANSFORMATION OF UKRAINIAN PEASANTRY IN THE FIRST THIRD OF THE 20th CENTURY

Author of the paper argues that in the age of revolutionary shakes of the first third of the XX century, Ukrainian peasantry lost its traditional religiousness under the influence of general social modernization. The background of research is an analysis of modern research practices, widespread in Ukrainian and partially, foreign historiography. One of the perspectives is their optimization, depending upon possibilities and certain tasks, that lies before historian. And the task is the ascertainment of religiousness as a factor of complex evolutionary processes, that seems to went “beyond the boundaries “of traditional beliefs. Thorough analysis of the problem attests that modern transformation (modernization) of society had for the first time in history seriously challenged the religiousness, established for centuries and millennia. That wasn’t an accidental, as in this historical period, human consciousness experienced the destruction of itself, to clarify – the consciousness of agrarian (traditional) society. Suffering certain psychological stress, it has been forcefully changing its inner world by adapting it to new reality. At the same time, religiousness did not abandoned human completely, but influenced noticeably the transformation itself. The result of such cooperation was an emerging of a “new human being” – collective farmer (kolgosp/kolhoz farmer) which had modified religiousness with noticeable inclusions of atheistic beliefs with the background of “Forgetting God”

Keywords: peasants, Naddnipryanschina (upper dnipro regions), religion, consciousness, piety, revolution.

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