Aggressors may carry out the forced dissolution, prohibition, and criminalization of the activities of independent educational, cultural, scientific, and charitable societies of the indigenous people. In the acute phase, this technique is used to neutralize defenses, depriving society of legal structures for horizontal self-organization. In the long term, it serves to consolidate control, since the liquidation of national civic institutions makes the legal development of national culture and the formation of independent elites impossible.
The destruction of the first political organization of the Ukrainian intelligentsia following student Petrov's denunciation to the secret police: "In March 1847 the society was crushed by the gendarmes. The police managed to identify 12 members of the clandestine organization"[1].
The purge of civic communities in the wake of the uprising's suppression: "the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1863–1864, which had a corresponding impact on the Ukrainophile movement, interpreted by the tsarist administration as an Austrian intrigue, led to the self-dissolution of the hromadas and the fading of public activity"[2].
The theater was banned not as repertoire but as an institution: the third point of the 1881 revision prescribed "to completely forbid the establishment of a specifically Little Russian theater and the formation of troupes for performing plays and scenes exclusively in the Little Russian dialect"[3]. Individual plays remained permissible - with administrative permission for each staging. The ban struck not at the text but at the very possibility of a permanent company existing: performing occasionally was allowed, being a Ukrainian theater was not. The report with this point was submitted by the minister of internal affairs Ignatiev; the emperor's assent followed on 8 October 1881[3].
The direct closure of legal educational societies: of the roughly forty "Prosvitas" of Russian-ruled Ukraine, those in the Poltava and Kharkiv regions were banned from their very founding, and in 1908–1910, under Stolypin, virtually all the rest were liquidated, except the branches of the Katerynoslav governorate[4]. The crackdown received its doctrinal grounding: Stolypin declared in an address to the Senate that the revival of Ukrainian cultural life was undesirable, for "the three principal branches of Eastern Slavdom, both by origin and by language, cannot but constitute one whole"[4].
Stolypin's circular to the governors (20 January 1910) — a complete ban on self-organization: "when considering petitions for the registration of any alien societies whatsoever… one must… refuse without fail the registration of their charters"[5].
The forcible suppression of protests and repressive measures against national self-organization of the same period: Stolypin's "instruction to the governors… demanding a halt to the registration of 'alien,' including Ukrainian, national cultural-educational societies"[6].
On 10 September 1919 colonel Matveev, temporary head of the Whites' administration in the city of Mykolaiv, issued an ordinance: all unions and societies that had not submitted their charters or had not been confirmed by the circuit court were deemed closed[7]. The Ukrainian enlightenment societies, grown up over the years of the revolution without confirmation under the pre-revolutionary procedure, fell under this condition wholesale: no separate order was needed to close them - it was precisely thus, by a formally neutral condition, that the Whites closed the Ukrainian societies. Historians of the Institute of History of Ukraine confirm the outcome: Ukrainian institutions under the Whites were liquidated, and Russian ones were set up in their place[8].
The colonizer repressed almost the entire Union of Writers of Chechen-Ingushetia. On 20 November 1937 the bureau of the oblast committee of the party (the "obkom VKP(b)") dissolved the board of the writers of the republic - the resolution's wording: "as having proved clogged with hostile bourgeois-nationalist elements /Arsanov, Mamakayev, Aiskhanov and others/"[9]. One of the convicted, Khalid Oshaev, wrote in 1961 to the Ossetian writer Khadzhi-Murat Muguev: "of the 12 members of the union of writers of Chechen-Ingushetia 9 people were arrested, 7 convicted, 4 shot. I myself, a member of the Union of Writers since 1934, spent 13 years in confinement, and for 2 years was held in solitary confinement"[10].
The forcible closure of all national councils, pedagogical institutes, theaters and cultural institutions of ethnic minorities in the Ukrainian SSR[11]: the national districts and village soviets were liquidated by the resolution of the Orgburo of the Central Committee of the VKP(b) of 24 January 1938[12], and the resolution of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the KP(b)U of 10 April 1938 reorganized the national schools and colleges and turned the Odesa German Pedagogical Institute into an institute of foreign languages[13].