The Ukrainian party boss who denied the famine, felled by Stalin's bullet
In April 1932, as famine spread across Ukraine, Kosior cabled Stalin: "All talk of 'famine' in Ukraine must be categorically rejected. There are individual starving villages, but this is merely the result of local bungling."
A Polish worker's son who joined the Bolsheviks in 1907, worked in the Donbas and Kiev underground, and helped found the Communist Party of Ukraine. As First Secretary from 1928 to 1938, he rose, unusually for a non-Russian, to the very top of the Soviet leadership, driving collectivisation and industrialisation; during the famine of 1932–33 he denied its existence while grain requisitions continued. Full Politburo member from 1930. At the close of the Great Terror, in May 1938, he was arrested as a 'Polish Military Organisation' spy and shot in February 1939. Rehabilitated in 1956.
Career Timeline
- 1907–1917Underground Bolshevik in Donbas; multiple arrests and exile
- 1917.10Commissar of Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee
- 1919–1920Secretary of CC CP(b)U
- 1926–1928Secretary of CC VKP(b), member of Orgburo
- 1928–1938General Secretary → First Secretary of CC CP(b)U
- 1930–1938Full member of Politburo CC VKP(b)
- 1938.5Arrested as 'Polish Military Organisation' spy
- 1939.2.26Sentenced to death by Military Collegium; shot same day
Related historical events
- 1917.10–1918.01The October Revolutionmember of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionSecretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationUkrainian first secretaryAs first secretary of the Ukrainian party, he was responsible for implementing collectivization and grain procurement, and was the republic's top official during the worst of the famine.
- 1932–1933The Holodomor and the Collectivisation FamineFirst Secretary of the CP(B)U; denied the famine while enforcing procurementsLed the Ukrainian Party 1928–1938, directing collectivisation. In April 1932 he cabled Stalin: 'All talk of famine in Ukraine must be categorically rejected.' Insisted on fulfilling procurement plans throughout 1932–33.
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeTargetFirst secretary of the Ukrainian party and a Politburo member, arrested and executed in 1939.
1932, Grain Procurement and the Famine in Ukraine
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.
May 3, 1938: the Charge of the "Polish Military Organization"
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.