LOSSES OF THE WEST RUSSIAN VILLAGE DUE TO THE AXIS AGGRESSION: SCALE AND CONSEQUENCES

The article analyses the impact of human and material losses of the village of the West of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (the RSFSR) on the peculiarities of reconstruction processes in the first post-war years in terms of the diverse sources, many of which have recently been introduced into the scientific turnover. The deficit of manpower, equipment, and capital investments in the region’s agriculture, including one due to wartime losses, significantly slowed down the agricultural production industrialisation completion, predetermined inability to solve key problems of life and labour of the population, became one of the important causes of low incomes of many collective and state farms, the reduction of arable land since the early 1950s, and the long dominance of extra-economic coercion and its supporting structures in the countryside. The consequences of the war devastation combined with the unpopular agrarian policy of the first post-war years brought to life the improvement of adaptive behaviour by the village, which the authorities spent a lot of energy and resources to combat. The losses of the war years and harsh agrarian policy were also the key reasons for the undermining of the preserved elements of traditional culture of the village of the West of the RSFSR.