Stanislav Vikentyevich Kosior

Stanisław Kosior was born in 1889 in Węgrów, Siedlce Governorate, Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire, to factory workers Vikenty Yanovich Kosior and Yelena Frantsevna (née Filippek). There were five brothers, Stanisław, Władysław, Józef, Kazimierz and Mikhail, and a sister Sofia; at least four besides the youngest, Mikhail, became revolutionary underground activists. He finished the Sulin factory primary school in 1902 and worked as a fitter at the Sulin works; he took part in the factory strikes of November 1905. After the December lockout the family moved to Alchevsk, and in June 1907 he joined the RSDLP as organizer of the Yuryevka factory sub-district.

He was soon arrested, spent three months in prison and was dismissed from the works. Under threat of a new arrest he left for Sulin in August 1908, headed the Sulin party organization in 1908-1911, and in 1910 created a football circle as cover for underground work. He was briefly arrested four times and in 1911 was administratively exiled to Yekaterinoslav Governorate. From 1912 to 1914 he was on illegal work in Kharkiv, Kiev and Poltava, and in the autumn of 1914 he was among the organizers of the Kiev committee of the RSDLP(b). After that committee collapsed he moved to Moscow in 1915, from where he was exiled for three years to Irkutsk Governorate.

After the February Revolution he moved to Petrograd, worked in the party organization of the Narva-Petergof district, and became a member of the Petersburg Bolshevik committee and its Executive Commission. In October 1917 he was a commissar of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee, and during the Brest-Litovsk period he belonged to the "Left Communists".

He was one of the organizers of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine in 1918. From March 1918 he was People's Secretary (Commissar) of Finance of Ukraine, and from April a member of the Orgburo for convening the First Congress of the CP(b)U. In August 1918 he directed illegal party work in German-occupied Ukraine, and from November 1918 to February 1919 he was secretary of the underground Right-Bank (Kiev) oblast committee of the CP(b)U. Sources differ on his term as secretary of the Central Committee. The Russian infobox gives 30 May 1919 to 17 November 1920; English sources give 1919 to 1920, and the English infobox lists 30 May to 10 December 1919 and 25 March to 17 October 1920. The Ukrainian article gives May to December 1919 and March to November 1920. The official formulation in the 1956 rehabilitation document records him only as secretary of the CC CP(b)U in 1919. In July-December 1919 he headed the Zafrontbureau of the party's Central Committee.

From 1921 he was a member of the Ukrainian commission on the history of the October Revolution and the Communist Party (Istpart), and from 1922 to 1924 secretary of the Siberian Bureau of the CC RCP(b). A candidate member from 1923, he became a member of the CC VKP(b) in 1924. His all-union secretariat term is also reported inconsistently: the English infobox gives full membership of the 14th and 15th Secretariat as 1 January 1926 to 12 July 1928, the Russian infobox gives 1926-1928, and the 1956 rehabilitation document says he worked as CC VKP(b) secretary "from 1925 to 1928".

The family record survives as well. His brothers Władysław, Kazimierz and Mikhail were repressed along with him, and the English source records that Władysław was executed during the purges and that Józef died of illness in 1937. His mother, Yelena Frantsevna, died in Kharkiv on 21 January 1934.

Stanisław Kosior was born into a worker's family in Węgrów, Poland, labored in the ironworks of the Donbass, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1907 as a veteran of the underground. He led party organizations in Ukraine during the civil war, and from 1928 stood at the front line of collectivization and industrialization as general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, joining the all-union Politburo in 1930.

The Kosior of 1932–33 restored by archival research has a double face. He was the man ultimately responsible in Ukraine for enforcing the grain procurement targets handed down from Moscow, and into the spring of 1932 he sent the center reports that underestimated the scale of the famine. At the same time, from that summer he repeatedly petitioned for lower targets, seed loans, and food relief. As the procurement crisis turned catastrophic, the Molotov commission arrived at the end of 1932 and harsh measures such as blacklisting and fines in kind were imposed. The research of Davies and Wheatcroft explains the famine as a catastrophe compounded of excessive procurement targets, successive poor harvests, and failed crisis management, while clearly recording the responsibility of the republican leadership, Kosior included, which knew the condition of the countryside and still put procurement first. From 1933 he also directed the delivery of seed and food relief to the famine regions and the sowing campaigns.

Kosior's name cannot be separated from a disaster that cost millions of lives. Archive-based historiography paints him neither as the architect of a deliberate massacre nor as a helpless bystander. He was the Ukrainian executor of the national choice of forced-pace industrialization, and no account of these years can omit the fact that the peasantry paid the price of that choice.

In January 1938 Kosior left the Ukrainian party leadership for Moscow, becoming deputy chairman of the USSR Council of People's Commissars and chairman of the Soviet Control Commission. What looked like a promotion led within months to arrest. The "Polish operation" launched by NKVD Order No. 00485 in August 1937 was a mass operation aimed at people of Polish origin and Polish connections; by archival count more than 110,000 people were shot in this operation alone. Kosior, a Polish-born member of the Politburo, was arrested at the height of this storm on May 3, 1938.

The charge against him was leadership of the "Polish Military Organization" (POW), an underground network that did not exist. A confession was extracted under torture, and on February 26, 1939 a military tribunal sentenced him to death; the sentence was carried out the same day. Vlas Chubar and Pavel Postyshev, who had worked alongside him in Ukraine, were shot on the same date. A man who had enforced collectivization was, a few years later, ground up by the same machine on fabricated charges.

In 1956 the USSR Supreme Court rehabilitated Kosior, and Khrushchev named his case in the Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress as an emblematic instance of fabricated repression. Post-Soviet archival research confirmed that the entire "Polish Military Organization" case was a fiction manufactured inside the NKVD. Kosior's life shows how the two faces of the 1930s, responsibility for forced-pace construction and victimhood in a fabricated terror, could overlap in a single person.