The problem of liquidation of "unpromising" villages in the journalistic reflection of the authors of "village prose"

This paper deals with the problem of elimination of numerous rural settlements in the Russian Federa- tion in the period from the 1960s to the early 1980s in connection with the implementation of the state agrarian policy aimed at liquidation of villages called "unpromising" in the official party-state decisions, documentation and propaganda. For the first time in the Russian historical science, the journalistic works of famous writers - repre- sentatives of the so-called “village prose”, V.G. Rasputin, B.A. Mozhaev, F.A. Abramov and V.I. Belov, are analyzed as a historical source providing insight into the practice of the implementation of this policy. Appealing to the journalistic genre as a means of civil protest, these authors were the first to raise the issue of the tragic for the Russian people consequences of the policy of liquidation of "unpromising" villages, having considered it in the context of peasant identity loss and concomitant depopulation of the Russian people. This is the reason for the scientific significance of the above-mentioned journalism of these authors, without which it is impossible to comprehensively study the stated problem. The historical orientation of the research predetermines the use of general historical methods and approaches. Among them, the most important is the principle of historicism, which focuses on the study of specific historical conditions of the disappearance of tens of thousands of villages in those years, taking into account the complex influence of both internal and external factors. Thus, in their topical articles and essays the authors of “village prose”, having analyzed in detail the consistency of both official and hidden motives of the state settlement policy, convincingly proved its perniciousness, as well as the fact that the unfavorable factors for the majority of villages, called by officials "unpromising”, were largely artificially created by the authorities at various levels.