Georgy Leonidovich Pyatakov
Георгий Леонидович Пятаков
The Bolshevik between revolution and the industrial plan
January 1937, in the dock at the second Moscow trial. The German writer Lion Feuchtwanger recorded: "I shall never forget how Georgy Pyatakov, a gentleman of medium height, middle-aged, with a small bald patch and a reddish, old-fashioned, trembling pointed beard, stood before the microphone and calmly, diligently narrated how he had wrecked the industry entrusted to him. He explained, pointing with an outstretched finger, like a university lecturer — a historian delivering a report on the life and deeds of a long-dead man named Pyatakov, striving to clarify every detail, seized by the single desire that his listeners and students should understand everything correctly."
A Bolshevik revolutionary and the first head of Soviet Ukraine. As a Left Communist, he fiercely opposed Lenin over the Brest-Litovsk Treaty and the national question, and was one of only six Bolsheviks named in Lenin's Testament. Expelled as a Left Oppositionist, he recanted and returned to drive the Five-Year Plans as Deputy Commissar of Heavy Industry, before becoming chief defendant at the second Moscow show trial and being executed in 1937.
Career timeline
- 1910–1917Joined Bolsheviks, Kiev underground, exile and emigration
- 1917–1918Kiev chairman, State Bank seizure, Left Communist faction
- 1918–1920CP(b)U Central Committee secretary, head of Ukraine government, GRU chief
- 1920–1927Donbas, Gosplan & VSNKh deputy chairman, Left Opposition
- 1928–1930Readmitted to party, Gosbank chairman, credit reform
- 1930–1936Deputy & 1st Deputy Commissar of Heavy Industry, Five-Year Plans
- 1936–1937Arrested, chief defendant at second Moscow trial, executed