The party secretary who warned Molotov that grain seizures would leave nobody to plant, shot four years later
"Soon there will be nobody left to plant the crop and harvest it": Khataevich to Molotov, 23 November 1932. Molotov's same-day reply: "A true Bolshevik must place the needs of the State first."
Mendel Khataevich was born in 1893 to a Jewish merchant family in Gomel, trained as a dental technician, and joined the Bolsheviks in 1913. As Second Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party in November 1932, he warned Molotov by letter that "if we do not take into account the minimal needs of the kolkhozes, there will soon be nobody left to plant the crop and harvest it." Molotov replied that "a true Bolshevik must place the needs of the State first." Demoted to Dnipropetrovsk First Secretary in 1933, he became an enforcer of the famine he had foreseen, reporting starvation and cannibalism to Stalin. Arrested in the Great Purge, he was shot in October 1937 on charges of belonging to a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization and rehabilitated in 1956.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1913–1917Underground Bolshevik in Gomel; multiple arrests, exiled to Yenisei Governorate, amnestied March 1917
- 1917–1921Party posts in Gomel and Samara; taken prisoner by Czech troops, paralysed right hand; political commissar, 21st Rifle Division, Western Front
- 1921–1925Responsible Secretary, Gomel (1921–23) and Odessa gubernia committees (1923–24); Deputy Head, Org-Raspred Department CC VKP(b) (1924–25)
- 1925–1928Responsible Secretary, Tatar Oblast Committee VKP(b)
- 1928–1932First Secretary, Middle Volga Regional Committee VKP(b): directed mass collectivisation, mass arrests and deportations of kulaks
- 1932.10–1933.01Second Secretary CC CP(b)U: co-signed grain confiscation directives; warned Molotov of famine in November letter
- 1933–1937.03First Secretary, Dnipropetrovsk Regional Committee CP(b)U; reported starvation and cannibalism to Stalin yet praised collectivisation's triumph at the 1934 Party Congress
- 1937.03–10Again Second Secretary CC CP(b)U; arrested September 1937, sentenced to death 27 October, shot 30 October 1937
Related historical events
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationDnipropetrovsk regional first secretaryIn November 1932, he warned Molotov that seizing kolkhoz reserves meant 'there will soon be nobody left to plant the crop and harvest it'; Molotov replied that a true Bolshevik must place the needs of the State first.
- 1932–1933The Holodomor and the Collectivisation FamineCo-signer of grain confiscation directivesAs Second Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, he co-signed grain confiscation directives.
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeParty official arrested and shot in the Great PurgeArrested in September 1937, he was shot on 30 October.
First Secretary of the Middle Volga and forced collectivisation, 1928-1932
During the four years before he was transferred to Ukraine in October 1932, Khataevich was the regional executor of collectivisation and of the campaign to eliminate the kulaks as a class, serving as First Secretary of the Middle Volga territorial party committee. Appointed to the post in Samara in August 1928, he held it until October 1932. The Middle Volga was a grain-producing region and one of the core zones of wholesale collectivisation. The outcome of this period survives in figures. Average grain yields in the Middle Volga collapsed from 38.9 poods per hectare in 1930 to 22.0 in 1931, while over the same period actual state grain procurements rose from 46.6 million poods in 1929/30 to 72.3 million in 1930/31. In 1931 harvest losses in the region reached 35.6 percent of the gross grain crop. The situation he would warn Molotov about in Ukraine in November 1932, that soon nobody would be left to sow and harvest, was thus one he had helped create first in the Middle Volga. A statement attributed to him in 1930 captures his role at this time: that local rural authority needed an injection of Bolshevik iron, and that officials should throw their bourgeois humanism out the window and obtain grain at any price. This account reaches us through later sources, and the verbatim accuracy of the quotation itself remains open to question.