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.
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