THE POLITICAL REPRESSIONS OF 1918-1953 OF THE TAMBOV SOCIAL ELITE: CHARACTER AND STRUCTURE

The character and structure of political repressions of the Tambov social elite of 1920-1940s is considered. The source for research were prosopographic electronic database (DB) of repressed elite, which includes more than a thousand personalities, and was created on the basis of the preparatory work on the Memory Book of political repression of the Tambov region. In the result of the analysis of the DB the movement of representatives of regional social elite through the historical stages of Soviet political repression is shown. Age and gender structure of the repressed and its correlation with punishment is set. Thus, the proportion of women amounted to less than 5 %, which corresponds to the level of the elite of the labour market. Most of the victims were between the ages of 41 to 50 years (27 %), with most sentenced to death elderly people over 71 years (in 77.3 % of cases). The aggregate share of the shootings was 35.9 %, with women less likely than men sentenced to death (14.9 and 36.9 %, respectively). Considered through the prism of purges national and professional composition of social activists the largest share of the death penalty among the Jews and the party-Soviet and industrial leaders was shown. Repression of the Great Terror period (1937-1938) as the most massive and violent (64 % of all those arrested and executed 95.4 % of the Tambov “elitists”) is separately analyzed. Thus, the study showed that created electronic DB on continuous, long lines and representative lines of sociographic personal information allows unbiased to consider the political repression of the regional social elites and to describe their dynamics and structure.

data base, Great Terror, upper social strata, political repression, Tambov region, elite