Learned helplessness as a factor of impoverishment of the Don Cossacks at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries

The article attempts to analyze the psychological cause for the impoverishment of the Don Cossacks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Attempts to apply the developments of modern psychology to study the history of the Cossacks have not been made up to the present time. Meanwhile, back in 1890 a major researcher of the Don Cossacks N.A. Maslakovets noted that the impoverishment of the Cossack farms is caused by both objective socioeconomic and subjective psychological causes. The question about the Cossacks’ lack of «personal energy» in economic activity was considered in detail by the socalled «commission of N.A. Maslakovets», which met in Novocherkassk in 1899. However, historiography did not raise the question about the subjective psychological causes for the impoverishment of the Don Cossacks. Meanwhile, the description of the psychological problems of the Cossacks by their contemporaries makes it possible to clearly classify the main problem of the Don Cossacks as a syndrome of learned helplessness. Apparently, it began to form in the middle of the 19th century, when the Don Cossacks found themselves in stressful and uncontrollable conditions for the development of a commodity economy and the growth of duties (situational helplessness), and in the Cossack environment, subordination within the family was supplemented by the introduction of military discipline in civil life (personal helplessness). At the same time, it is rather difficult to get out of the state of learned helplessness syndrome on our own, and, from the point of view of modern psychology, it should be considered as a significant factor in the impoverishment of Cossacks.

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