The Phenomenon of Sabotage in the Socio-Political Context and in Contemporary Discourse of Humanitarian Knowledge

Abstract

On the basis of the documents of the Archive of the Russian Federation President and regional archives authors come to a conclusion about the key importance of “sabotage” of the concept for the understanding of the era, in the context of large-scale reflection of the social project that engulfed Soviet society in the 1920s — 1930s. Its purpose advocated the formation of a meaning of social and cultural space, necessary to compensate for the social cost and sacrifice and for the rebalancing of the system of social and political interaction. The appeal to customary law, to a picture of the world of the traditional society, was needed for optimal regulation of social behavior and strengthening executive discipline in the conditions of forced industrialization. These documents indicate the existence of a direct relationship between the start of a massive politicization of economic processes and increased repression and the policy of collectivization. “Saboteurs” were punished for the organization of counter-revolutionary sabotage in the machine-tractor stations and state farms of a number of areas of Ukraine, the North Caucasus and Belarus, expressed in the deterioration and destruction of tractors and agricultural machinery, deliberate contamination of fields, setting fire machine-tractor stations, machine-tractor workshops harvesting and threshing in order to undermine the material situation of the peasantry and the creation of the state of hunger in the country and so forth. In the future, the arbitrariness of ordinary executors of party guidelines served as the basis for the organization of the extermination of an entire layer of the nomenclature, which was entrusted with the mission of breaking the unpopular former system. Objectively, their fate was sealed from the outset, and all top managers at the district level have been punished. In the process of the Great Terror among the accused will appear, as a rule, the secretaries and chairmen of district committees, MTS director, heads of departments of land and livestock departments.