The philosophy of the Ukrainian ethnic group’s destruction in the Soviet period

Abstract

The phenomenon of the destruction of the Ukrainian ethnic group during the Soviet times of the first half of the 20th century is analyzed. This phenomenon is represented as a consequence of the brutal violence and aggression of the Soviet authorities towards the Ukrainian ethnic group. In modern conditions, most studies of the violence phenomenon note that in the twentieth century mankind was faced with its unprecedented escalation. World War, Genocide, Holocaust, Terror - all these specific forms of violence have not only touched the Soviet Union but have also become an integral part of its history and culture. Violence has penetrated into all spheres of life and has become a universal means of resolving conflicts. However, the enlargement of violence does not yet determine the specificity of the present.

The analysis of historical events of this period is based on two methodological approaches: ethological and anthropological, which have become most widely used in the philosophical and anthropological discourse on violence. These research approaches link the phenomenon of culture with the phenomenon of violence and, therefore, unlike most other approaches, represent violence as the direct object of the study rather than treating it as a secondary phenomenon, resulting from the failure of a particular system.

In the last century, Soviet space was experiencing a powerful wave of radical socio-cultural transformations that changed the contextual conditions of human existence, which was stimulated by the rapid development of cultural and communicative technologies, socio-political disasters, and the existential significance of urban space was increasing. The tendencies of destruction, chaotization, the growth of uncertainty, the change of thinking, and value-semantic orientations of existence cause the disorientation of consciousness, which loses certain worldview points. On the one hand, there is the development of cutting-edge technologies that aim at rationalizing the processes of life-creation, and on the other hand, these technologies generate phenomena that offset the meaning of these values: from manipulation of consciousness to postmodernist the very discrediting idea of life. All this in the first half of the twentieth century in the territories of "underdeveloped communism" led to mass repressions and in fact, posed a threat to the destruction of the elite part of society. The research of the self-destruction problem of a person is not only in the empirical confirmation and statement of the anthropological destruction phenomenon but in the analysis of the foundations of the destruction in personality as one of the Soviet repression origins. The authors argue that the self-destruction of the individual is not only a socio-philosophical problem that is related to the corresponding forms of the society organization, its ideologies and technologies but also philosophical and anthropological, which emphasizes on the priorities of the human development concept as individuals with the expressed spiritual dominant in life.