Vlas Yakovlevich Chubar

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.

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.