Contenu du sommaire

Andrea Graziosi, Collectivization, peasant revolts and government policies through the reports of the Ukrainian GPU (February-March 1930). Seventeen up to now unpublished reports from the former party archives are presented to the reader. They were addressed to the Soviet leadership by the Ukrainian GPU in the cmcial moment of the peasants' reaction to the first wave of collectivization and dekulakization (February-March, 1930). The introductive essay discusses first the genera] interpretative problems they raise, focusing especially on the relationships between 1918-1921 and 1929- 1933, seen as two acts of the same peasant war. It then analyses the specific contributions these reports give to our knowledge of those cmcial months. The essay is concluded by a brief assessment of Western scholarship on collectivization before the opening of Russian archives.

Viktor Danilov et Alexis Berelowitch, Documents of the VChK-OGPU-NKVD on the Soviet rural world, 1918-1937. A team of Russian, Italian and French historians is working since 1993 on police reports of the OGPU bearing on villages (zemsvodki), preserved mainly in Central Archives of the Federal Information Service. The objective of the present article is to give an idea of the nature of these documents (zemsvodki, obzory, dokladnye zapiski, etc.), of the subjects they deal with (famines, tax collections, requisition of grain in 1928, collectivization, deportation of "kulaks"), of the various types of information sources (statistical data, incidents, statements repeated by informers, raw documents : tracts, letters). The introduction defines the problem of the use of this type of archives and of the contribution of these documents to the historiography of Soviet peasantry.

Valérie Le Galcher-Baron, Collectivization of ovine livestock in the east of Georgia. The present article is studying the development of collectivization in an area of Georgian mountains (the district of Axmet'a, comprising Tushetia, north-eastern region) where ovine breeding dominates. On basis of archival material and local reports, an analysis is made of the confrontations between breeders and planners. With the progress of time, stress can be laid on fluctuations and reversals of governmental instructions and the way in which they have to be adjusted to local situations.