The decade-long head of Byelorussia's government who signed the Academy purge, then stood in the same dock
On 21 June 1937, during interrogation in a fifth-floor room of the Minsk NKVD, Goloded — accused as a 'Polish spy' — threw himself from the window; the official cause was suicide, but unofficial accounts claim he was beaten to death and the jump staged.
Born into a Belarusian peasant family, he worked as a shepherd and miner from the age of seven before joining the Bolsheviks in 1918 and organizing a Red Guard unit. From 1927 he chaired the Council of People's Commissars of the Byelorussian SSR for a decade, steering industrialization and collectivization that transformed the republic from agrarian to industrial, earning the Order of Lenin in 1935. In December 1930 he personally signed the resolution expelling leading academicians from the Belarusian Academy of Sciences as 'enemies of the proletarian revolution.' Arrested in June 1937 as a 'Polish-linked enemy of the people,' he died after throwing himself from a fifth-floor NKVD interrogation room in Minsk. Unofficial accounts claim he was beaten to death and the suicide staged.
Career Timeline
- 1911–1915Track repairman, locksmith, and electromechanic at the Dubovaya Balka mine, Krivoy Rog
- 1917Revolutionary agitation in soldiers' committees, Southwestern Front
- 1918–1921Joined RCP(b); organised Red Guard unit fighting German and UNR troops; Soviet work in Novozybkov district
- 1921–1924Chairman of Gorki District Executive Committee; chairman of anti-banditry troika
- 1925–1927Second Secretary, Central Committee of the CP(b) of Belarus
- 1927–1937Chairman, Council of People's Commissars of the BSSR; led industrialisation and collectivisation
- 1930Candidate member, CC VKP(b); signed resolution expelling six academicians from the Belarusian Academy of Sciences
- 1937.6.14Arrested in Moscow, transferred to Minsk; died 21 June during NKVD interrogation
- 1956Posthumously rehabilitated and reinstated in the Party