Vlas Yakovlevich Chubar

When the Bolsheviks consolidated control over Ukraine in 1920, its industry lay in ruins after the Civil War. The Donbas coalfields were flooded, equipment had been stripped, and coal output in 1920 stood at barely 15 percent of the pre-war level. Chubar was appointed chairman of the Organisational Bureau for the Restoration of Ukrainian Industry in January 1920, tasked with rebuilding the shattered factories and mines, and from December 1921 he directly oversaw the Donbas recovery as chairman of the Central Coal Industry Administration. Under his leadership, coal production rebounded rapidly, laying the energy foundation for Ukraine's industrialisation.

In July 1923 Chubar became Chairman of the Ukrainian SSR's Council of People's Commissars, a post he held for eleven years while directing the republic's economy. During the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) Ukraine received a fifth of all-Union capital investment, and landmark heavy-industry projects were constructed or expanded on his watch: the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station (DniproHES), the Kharkiv Tractor Factory, and the metallurgical complexes of Kryvyi Rih and Zaporizhzhia. At the 11th Congress of the Communist Party of Ukraine in Kharkiv in June 1930, Chubar openly defended the republic's economic interests by demanding that the Ukrainian government exercise control over Union-level enterprises operating on its territory, pushing back against Moscow's centralising tendencies. He was simultaneously a loyal executor of the all-Union industrialisation drive and an advocate for republican economic prerogatives.

Yet this industrialisation carried an enormous human cost. Forced grain extractions from the peasantry financed the factories, and Chubar, as a central enforcer of that system, bore its contradictions in full. His emergency grain-relief request during the 1932–33 famine was an expression of precisely that contradiction. Confronted with the tragedy produced by the industrial order he had helped build, he revealed a fissure between the loyal administrator and his own conscience.

In the spring of 1932, famine spread rapidly across the Ukrainian countryside as a result of the previous year's excessive grain extractions. Chubar spent fifteen days in May and June visiting the hardest-hit raions of Kyiv and Vinnytsia oblasts. What he saw was catastrophic: "People were starving everywhere. Women were crying, even the men sometimes." Peasants confronted him directly: "Why have you created this artificial famine? We had a harvest, why did you confiscate it all? Even under the old regime, no one would have done this!"

On 10 June 1932 Chubar sent an urgent letter to Stalin and Molotov reporting that at least 100 districts required emergency food assistance and requesting one million poods (roughly 16,000 tonnes) of grain relief. Hryhorii Petrovsky, chairman of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee, sent a parallel appeal. Together, these were the first documented top-level reports formally notifying the Soviet leadership of the famine's existence.

Stalin responded in a letter to Kaganovich on 15 June: "I did not like the letters from Chubar and Petrovsky. The former spouts 'self-criticism' in order to secure millions more poods of bread from Moscow; the latter is feigning sainthood to reduce grain-procurement levels." On 11 August he was more blunt: "Chubar is not a leader." He then proposed replacing him. Yet Stalin did not dismiss him immediately. Despite the open clash, Chubar remained chairman of the Ukrainian Sovnarkom until 1934, suggesting that Stalin still valued him as a controllable administrator who could keep Ukraine functioning. The June 1932 letters remain a central piece of evidence for assessing Chubar's conduct during the famine.

In 1934 Chubar was transferred to Moscow. Though the move followed Stalin's loss of trust in him, he was appointed Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of People's Commissars and of the USSR Council of Labour and Defence, and in February 1935 became a full member of the Politburo. From 16 August 1937 to 19 January 1938 he served as USSR People's Commissar of Finance.

In the early stages of the Great Purge Chubar supported Stalin loyally. At the February 1937 Central Committee plenum that sanctioned the arrest of Bukharin and other former opponents of collectivisation, he made an inflammatory speech accusing them of "open counter-revolution", calling Bukharin a "snake" and alleging that Trotsky and his supporters were "agents of fascism". The historian Robert Conquest assessed that Chubar "had expressed doubt ... that Moscow's policies would lead to disaster, nevertheless enforced them". This conduct is a documented fact and must be recorded as such, not moralised.

On 16 June 1938 the Politburo ruled that he could no longer sit on the Politburo or serve as a USSR Sovnarkom deputy chairman "in view of the fact that the testimony of Kosior, Eikhe, Comr[ade] Chubar and, besides, the testimony of Rudzutak and Antipov cast a shadow on Comr. V. Ya. Chubar", deciding to "give him work only in the provinces for testing". The next day it appointed him head of construction of the Solikamsk cellulose combine. On 4 July 1938 the NKVD arrested him; the charge was that he had been a participant in an anti-Soviet terrorist sabotage-wrecking organisation and an agent of German intelligence. On 26 February 1939 the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced him to death, and the sentence was carried out the same day. According to the Martyrdom list he is buried at Donskoe cemetery, common grave No. 1.

A 1955 KGB and Procuracy review established that the accusation against him had been completely falsified; he was rehabilitated by the Military Collegium on 24 August 1955 and, in party terms the same year, by decision of the CPSU Central Committee Control Committee. A conflicting account is recorded alongside this. The Encyclopedia of Ukraine (1984) states that "Chubar was arrested in 1937 and subsequently either was shot or died a prisoner. He was rehabilitated in the 1960s." Because this dating of the arrest and rehabilitation conflicts with the Soviet record, it is presented explicitly rather than silently harmonised.

At the 20th Party Congress in 1956 Khrushchev told delegates that Chubar's case had been handed to the torturer Boris Rodos, who had orders to force a confession out of him. NKVD head Lavrenty Beria arranged a confrontation in his office with Chubar's former colleague Nikolai Antipov, who had broken under interrogation and testified against him, prompting Chubar's exclamation "I cherished this snake next to my heart. Provocateur!" Molotov later justified the arrest by claiming "He was with the rightists; we all knew it, we sensed it". These are statements attributed to Khrushchev's secret speech and to the research of Getty and Naumov. His family was repressed as well: his brother Trofim Yakovlevich Chubar was arrested before him and testified against him, was included in execution lists, and his subsequent fate is unknown; his wife Aleksandra Ivanivna Chubar (1903–1938), arrested with him on 4 July 1938, was shot on 28 August 1938 and rehabilitated on 3 September 1955. Together these events show how administrative responsibility in the 1932 famine and purge-era loyalism overlapped in one figure.