The decade-long head of Byelorussia's government who signed the Academy purge, then stood in the same dock
On 21 June 1937, during interrogation in a fifth-floor room of the Minsk NKVD, Goloded — accused as a 'Polish spy' — threw himself from the window; the official cause was suicide, but unofficial accounts claim he was beaten to death and the jump staged.
Born a peasant who herded cattle from age seven, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1918 and from 1927 chaired the Byelorussian government for a decade, leading the industrialization and collectivization that turned the republic from an agrarian into an industrial land, for which he received the Order of Lenin in 1935. Yet he who had personally signed the resolution expelling the republic's academicians fell victim to the same terror: arrested in 1937 as a 'Polish spy,' he died after throwing himself from a fifth-floor NKVD window in Minsk.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1911–1915Track repairman, locksmith, and electromechanic at the Dubovaya Balka mine, Krivoy Rog
- 1917Revolutionary agitation in soldiers' committees, Southwestern Front
- 1918–1921Joined RCP(b); organised Red Guard unit fighting German and UNR troops; Soviet work in Novozybkov district
- 1921–1924Chairman of Gorki District Executive Committee; chairman of anti-banditry troika
- 1925–1927Second Secretary, Central Committee of the CP(b) of Belarus
- 1927–1937Chairman, Council of People's Commissars of the BSSR; led industrialisation and collectivisation
- 1930Candidate member, CC VKP(b); signed resolution expelling six academicians from the Belarusian Academy of Sciences
- 1937.6.14Arrested in Moscow, transferred to Minsk; died 21 June during NKVD interrogation
- 1956Posthumously rehabilitated and reinstated in the Party
Related historical events
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationByelorussian industrialisation and collectivisation chiefHe personally drove the implementation of industrialisation and collectivisation in Byelorussia.
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeTarget · head of the Byelorussian governmentAfter a decade as head of Byelorussia's government, he was arrested in June 1937 as an alleged 'right-Trotskyist bloc' member and died under NKVD interrogation in Minsk, among the first victims of the terror's opening wave.
From agrarian republic to industrial state: industrialization and collectivization
From 1927, when he became chairman of the BSSR Council of People's Commissars, Goloded made the pace of the republic's economic growth his foremost concern for a full decade. He argued the case for industrialization and collectivization in Byelorussia and personally drove their implementation, playing a central role in transforming the republic from an agrarian into an industrial-agrarian country. The Belarusian state archive records this contribution explicitly and corroborates his award of the Order of Lenin in 1935 for 'outstanding successes over a number of years in agriculture and industry.'
Yet the transformation he led placed him on the side of a campaign that pitted the regime against the republic's intellectuals. In the early-1930s purge of Byelorussian 'national democracy,' Goloded, along with the rest of the republican leadership, personally signed the resolution branding academicians of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences as 'counterrevolutionary national-democrats' and expelling them. A leader who championed industrial construction put his hand to a document that stripped out the Belarusian assets of culture and learning. That he himself stood in the same dock a few years later makes this signature a compressed emblem of the price that era's leadership paid, and exacted, for industrialization.
Sources: Belarusian National Archive (archives.gov.by) biography; Spravochnik po istorii KPSS 1898–1991 (knowbysight.info); Russian Wikipedia.