Pavel Petrovich Postyshev

Pavel Postyshev was a worker-revolutionary, born into a weaver's family in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, who joined the party in 1904. After exile, underground work, and the civil war in the Far East, he worked in the Ukrainian party in the 1920s and from 1930 served as a secretary of the all-union Central Committee. In January 1933, as the procurement crisis and the famine reached their peak, he was sent to Ukraine as second secretary of the republican party. Formally the number two, he arrived retaining his all-union secretaryship and was in effect Moscow's plenipotentiary.

Postyshev's mandate was twofold: to complete the grain procurement and sowing campaigns, and to purge the Ukrainian party apparatus of "nationalist deviation". He kept up the procurement pressure while famine swept the countryside, and at the same time directed the distribution of seed loans and relief. Skrypnyk, the symbol of the Ukrainization policy, killed himself in July 1933 amid the denunciation campaign Postyshev led. The research of Davies and Wheatcroft and of Terry Martin documents how in these months Postyshev performed both roles at once, manager of crisis relief and executor of a political purge.

From 1934 he presided over the transfer of the republican capital to Kiev, its reconstruction, and the completion of industrialization, ruling as the republic's de facto master. The fact that he was the man sent to Ukraine in the famine year cannot be detached from his name, and the responsibility of these months must be recorded exactly as the archives confirm it.

In July 1934 the capital of the Ukrainian republic was moved from Kharkiv to Kyiv. Postyshev became first secretary of the Kyiv oblast party committee and took charge of the party organisation in the new capital, and in February 1934 he was elected a candidate member of the Politburo of the all-union Communist Party. English Wikipedia describes him as First Secretary of the Kyiv Party Committee in 1934-37. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine records that he was in charge of the Kyiv oblast party organisation from July 1934 to January 1937. As second secretary he was the real power in the republic, overshadowing the first secretary, Kosior.

The task in the new capital was its "socialist reconstruction". That process involved the demolition of churches and monuments and of Orthodox and Jewish cemeteries. At the same time he continued the offensive against Ukrainization. After university courses in Ukrainian history and language were closed in January 1933, in June 1933 Postyshev accused People's Commissar for Education Mykola Skrypnyk of "wrecking" the schools and universities by letting "Petliurite swine" gain control; Skrypnyk killed himself soon afterwards.

The scale of the purge he directed is documented. Over 15,000 officials were eliminated on charges of "nationalism", and thousands of authors, scholars, philosophers, artists, musicians and editors were exiled, executed or disappeared. The purge engulfed the party apparatus itself. He forced the removal of 237 district party secretaries and 249 district executive committee chairmen; almost 100,000 members were expelled in his first year in Ukraine and a further 168,000 through 1938, and his own report stated that the majority of those expelled were exiled or shot.

A documentary basis for the famine-responsibility record also exists. The 2010 Kyiv court case adopted his telegram of 18 September 1932 as its first piece of evidence; the telegram ordered the Ukrainian party leadership to meet grain export quotas despite warnings of mass starvation. On that basis the court found him posthumously guilty of organising the Holodomor and closed the case because of the defendants' deaths. This is a contested political and legal finding, not an uncontested historical verdict.

The phase ended with his release from the Kyiv post in January 1937. According to Russian Wikipedia he was also released from the second secretaryship of the CP(b)U in March 1937 and appointed secretary of the Kuibyshev obkom. The same source, on an explicitly flagged non-authoritative basis, attributes to him a campaign of seeking "fascist symbols" with a magnifying glass on school notebooks and food products and quoted words about shooting 200 trade workers; this is an unverified report and cannot be treated as documented speech.

Even the rehabilitation date is not single. The card and other sources give 1955 (1 June), while Russian Wikipedia states that the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court fully rehabilitated him in 1956, supported by Khrushchev's sympathy, and cites the historian Khlevniuk for a line according to which "Postyshev suffered for opposing Stalin's course of repressions" - an attributed assessment to be treated as such. The presidential rehabilitation-documents collection (Perm Memorial) records that the Presidium decisions rehabilitating Chubar, Rudzutak, Kosior, Postyshev, Kaminsky, Gamarnik and Eikhe were taken unanimously, while questions of responsibility and of publishing the truth about the repressions remained a bitter dispute within the leadership.

On December 28, 1935 Pravda carried a short letter from Postyshev proposing that the New Year fir tree (yolka), banned as a religious survival, be given back to the children. Within days of the letter, "Let's organize a good yolka for the children", fir trees stood in schools and palaces of culture across the country, and the New Year holiday with Ded Moroz and Snegurochka became one of the most beloved customs of Soviet life. To tens of millions of Soviet children, Postyshev was the unnamed benefactor of the New Year.

But the same man had another face. In March 1937, following the Nikolaenko affair, he was recalled from Ukraine and transferred to Kuibyshev as first secretary of the oblast, where he became one of the most zealous executors of the Great Terror. He declared dozens of district party committees "nests of enemies" and dissolved them wholesale, driving thousands of members to expulsion. At the January 1938 Central Committee plenum it was precisely these "excesses" that Malenkov attacked him for, and Postyshev was removed from candidate membership of the Politburo. A month later he was arrested; on February 26, 1939 he was shot, on the same day as Kosior and Chubar.

Postyshev was rehabilitated in 1955. The plenipotentiary of the famine year, the author of the letter that revived the yolka, the frenzy of the Kuibyshev purge, and the victim of fabricated charges: all four are facts about the same man, and archive-based history records every one of them without erasure.