Author
Kurinna Maryna
candidate of historical sciences, researcher of the department "Ukrainian Ethnological Center" of the M. Rylskyi Institute of Art studies, Folkloristics and Ethnology of the NAS of Ukraine.
Agriculture as the main form of business of the Czech colonists and their descendants in the second half of the 19th – during the 20th century (based on the materials of expeditionary studies of the Melitopol region)
Abstract
Agricultural activities of the Czech colonists and their descendants, from the moment of their resettlement to Melitopolshchyna to the late XXth century, were the basis of their household management. Thus, by the late XXth century, with the help of the Melitopol District authorities, the colonists had been endowed with fertile black earths, and at the turn of the XIXth and XXth centuries, a number of auxiliary measures were organized to improve the results of their work. The introduction of agricultural machinery not only facilitated farming work, but also provided an opportunity to conduct it efficiently in large areas.
In the early 1920s, as a result of the Land Code, the Czechs’ colonial status was canceled and they lost most of their land holdings. In the early 1930s, when the process of organizing collective farms accelerated, private Czech land holdings were forcibly transferred to collective agricultural property of the Prukopnik Artil. Significant miscalculations in the economic activity of the newly formed agricultural centre and the implementation of inflated grain procurement plans led to the winter 1932 awful famine in Czechograd.
Since the late 1950s, with the village of Novhorodkivka (renamed from Czechograd) turning into a Ukrainian collective farm, its leading agricultural production trends has been grain growing, gardening, and horticulture. The expansion of a range of agricultural activities by both Czech and Ukrainian peasants had led, by the late 1970s, to high agricultural achievements. After the 1980s USSR economic reforms, Czech agricultural activity came to develop in new forms of household management: brigade work agreements and check control. The radical changes occurring in agriculture in the early 1990s (replacement of the collective form of housekeeping with the private one), unfortunately, failed to ensure economic indicators of the previous period.
Keywords
Czech migrants, agricultural activities, peasant farming, Melitopolshchyna.
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