The Greatness of the Personality in the Hybrid Conditions of Totalitarianism: to the 80th Anniversary of the Memory of Mykola Radin

Abstract

This article is based on the analysis of human issues in history using the example of people in the leading positions of administration in the unique metallurgical industrial giants of the Dnieper Ukraine and Azov region, who were tasked with solving the problems of Soviet industrialization under the rule of a totalitarian regime in the USSR. The research is based on a wide range of published works, as well as newly found and in-depth researched documents of both federal and local Soviet state archival institutions, as well as the archive of the regional administration of the Security Service of Ukraine; with the main attention being focused on little-known events and facts. At the center of the study is one of the long-unknown figures of the big industry in Soviet Ukraine. For the first time in historical studies, the roles and relationships that the industrial manager Mykola Radin had with the Party Committee, under the conditions which were officially codified in the newly adopted Constitution of the Soviet Union and the Constitution of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, are analyzed and viewed through qualitative changes in society and somewhat expanded democracy, while almost simultaneously the ruling party demanded immediate deployment of a policy to target new "pests" and "enemies of the people". The article showcases the mechanism of cooperation between the young leaders of the plant's local Party Committee and the newly elected municipal Communist Party of Ukraine members with the Party's paramilitary units of the Soviet Secret Service of that era: the NKVD. The research of the archived documents of the plant’s Party Committee shows us proof that a Russian graduate of the Military Academy, without actually having any idea about the process of metallurgical production, used the local Party elections to organize a hybrid offensive against well-known and respectable specialists of industry, in the name of a prompt execution of the Stalinist Central Committee's program on the "strengthening of the class struggle with further progress towards Socialism", and hence the intensive searches for more "Pests" and "enemies of the people". Moreover, the agent of Moscow succeeded in organizing a kind of partnership with the local party leaders to further trouble the director of the plant. The research allowed us to prove and document the truth and decency of Mykola Radin, the head of the giant metallurgical plant, and the unfoundedness of the Party's attacks against him, which was very much characteristic of the absurdity of exaggeration among the Communisty Party functionaries, who lived in fear of the NKVD, especially during the Great Terror. Their hybrid offensive can be send as a model betrayal of humanity and basic decency. The historic memory proves a constant need for further deepening of the old and searching for the new information concerning repressed leaders of industrialization in Soviet Ukraine.