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In 1993–1995, a group of ten Ukrainian researchers from the NGO "Center for the Study of Oral History and Culture" under the leadership of Dr. William Noll (USA) conducted a large-scale study of the transformation of civil society in the villages of Ukraine, which took place under the pressure of an aggressive Soviet campaign to collectivize rural communities of Ukraine in the period 1920-1930.
The goal of the project was to collect primary sources of information about the life of the Ukrainian village before, during, and after collectivization. Using a specially designed and detailed questionnaire developed by the researchers, they recorded more than 400 interviews with older villagers in central and eastern Ukraine. The collected testimonies serve as primary sources for the analysis of the dramatic socio-cultural changes of 1920-1930.
Selected interviews (about one fourth of all recorded) were presented in William Noll's monograph The Transformation of Civil Society. Oral history of Ukrainian peasant culture of the 1920s-1930s, published in 1999 by RODOVID. The book became a living voice of those witnesses who experienced great changes in Ukraine, and a source for many domestic and Western researchers, documentarians, and historians.
Research areas: Kharkiv, Sumy, Poltava, Cherkasy, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Vinnytsia
Researchers: William Noll, Halyna Korniienko, Valentyna Borysenko, Larysa Novikova, Vira Zaichenko, Mykola Korniienko, Antonina Palahnyuk, Lidia Lykhach, Vladyslav Paskalenko, Serhii Kryvenko.
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