STATE POLICY ON SOCIAL PROTECTION FOR THE PATRIOTIC WAR INVALIDS IN POST-WAR UKRAINE IN 1945 - 1950

The paper focuses on a special status of the Patriotic War invalids as a social group in a post-war Ukrainian society as well as the attitude towards them by the Soviet state. The Purpose of the Research. The objective is historically to reconstruct the basic principles of the Soviet policy on social protection of veterans with disabilities and its first results during the first post-war years. The Methodological Basis. The principles of objectivity, historicism, system, and research comprise the methodology basis. There have been applied historical and genetic, comparative, statistic, diachronic, historical and anthropological methods. The scientific novelty of the study consists in doing for the first time the analysis of the Soviet regime's attitude to the Patriotic War invalids against the background of the Thin !famine in Ukraine. The Conclusions. The institutionalization of the social protection system for the Patriotic War invalids in the Ukrainian SSR took place during the period of 1940 - 1946. During the period of 1940 and 1941 the authorities legitimated pensioning for the potential war invalids. With the outbreak of the German-Soviet war; the Union and Republic Governments identified people with disabilitiesas a result of the war with Germany among other invalids officially calling the first "the Patriotic War invalids" and adding some new forins of social protection for them. The number of the Patriotic War invalids abruptly increased under conditions of the worsened economic situation and the beginning of the Third famine in the Ukrainian SSR. We have determined the fact of decreasing the number of registered war-disabled people with the help of "thorough medical and labour examination". Medical and Labour Examination Commissions took such actions under the pressure of the Party and Government of the Ukrainian SSR. They declared invalids as "fully recovered". Besides, many frontline invalids were transferred to lower groups of disability. The Ukrainian Republic governance had to turn to such actions to avoid the budget deficit for the system of social protection and additional economy of bread.