Planned agricultural resettlement in the Chelyabinsk region before and during the Great Patriotic War

Based on materials from the Chelyabinsk region, for the first time in regional historiography, this article attempts to study the planned agricultural resettlement in 1939-1945. The study was based mainly archive materials stored in the United State Archive of the Chelyabinsk Region. In accordance with the hypothesis of Soviet society as a society of a mobilization type, the authors consider the development and implementation of a model of planned agrarian migration of the population as an integral part of the mobilization processes in the Soviet Union on the eve of the Great Patriotic War. The model of agricultural resettlement itself is seen as ensuring the viability and development of Soviet civilization. The topic is revealed through state policy measures, collective farm support and migratory behavior of migrant peasants. The study of regulatory, directive, office work, accounting and statistical documents, ego-materials enabled the dynamics of migration flows over the years to be established. The problems faced by the migrants were shown and individual migration trajectories identified. The study also drew a main conclusion: voluntary planned agricultural resettlement initiated by the Soviet authorities was an objectively necessary event in the specific historical conditions of the turn of the 1930s-1940s. The direction of immigrants to the Chelyabinsk region was dictated by an acute shortage of labor in the South Ural collective farms. The state allocated significant material and financial resources to the oblast, provided the settlers and host collective farms with serious benefits. A key problem throughout the entire period under review was «reversal». In 1943-1945 the settlement of pre-war settlers was carried out