The 1930s, the Soviet Union. After investigation reveals that some members
of the former Bolshevik party question Stalin’s authority and that there is a
network of party members supposedly working against him, Stalin believes anyone with ties
to the Bolsheviks or Lenin’s government is a threat to his leadership and needs to go. He
initiates the Great Purge which starts with the arrests of party members, Bolsheviks, and
members of the Red Army and then grows to include Soviet peasants, members of the intelligentsia,
and members of certain nationalities. Among the victims of Stalin's campaign to solidify
his power is a man who in his position was responsible for the Great Ukrainian Famine
during which millions of people died from starvation. His name is Stanisław Kosior.
Stanisław Vikentyevich Kosior, son of factory workers, was born on 18 November 1889 in Węgrów,
today’s Poland, then part of the Russian Empire. Young Kosior worked at a steel mill and in 1907
he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which was formed to unite
the various revolutionary organizations of the Russian Empire into one party.
Kosior quickly became the head of the party's local branch. The
party’s Bolshevik faction eventually become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Due to his political activity, in 1907 Kosior was arrested and sacked from his job and the
following year felt obliged to leave the area due to police activity. He used connections to
get re-appointed at the Sulin factory in 1909, but was soon arrested again and deported to the
Pavlovsk mine. In 1913 he was transferred to Moscow and then to Kyiv and Kharkiv,
where he organized local Communist cells. In 1915 he was arrested by the Okhrana,
the secret police force of the Russian empire, and exiled to Siberia.
Since early 1917, Russia had been in a state of turmoil and in February 1917,
the Tsarist government's poor management of World War I had helped to inspire a popular uprising
which became known as the February Revolution. This first component of the Russian Revolution
forced the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and placed in power a Provisional Government of
liberal and socialist factions, ultimately under the leadership of Socialist Revolutionary party
member Alexander Kerensky. This brief experiment with pluralist democracy was a chaotic one,
and in the summer months, the continual deterioration of the war effort and an
increasingly dire economic situation caused the Russian workers, soldiers, and sailors to riot.
After the February Revolution Kosior moved to Petrograd, today’s Saint Petersburg,
where he headed the local branch of the Bolsheviks
On October 24–25, 1917, Bolshevik left-wing socialist forces under Vladimir Lenin seized
key government buildings and stormed the Winter Palace, then the seat of the new government in
Russia's capital, Petrograd. The Bolshevik Revolution, also referred to as the "Great
October Socialist Revolution," was the first successful Marxist coup in history. During
this chapter of the Russian Revolution, the ineffectual Provisional Government was
dislodged and ultimately replaced with a Soviet Socialist Republic under Lenin's leadership.
After the October Revolution Kosior moved to the German-controlled areas of the Eastern Front
of World War I and Ukraine, where he worked for the Bolshevik cause. After the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk, by which Russia withdrew from World War I, he moved back to Russia and from March
1922 to December 1925 he was head of the Siberian branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin succeeded him as the leader of the Soviet
Union. In January 1926, Kosior was appointed a Secretary of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party, working alongside the General Secretary, Joseph Stalin.
The Secretariat of the Central Committee was responsible for managing and directing
the day-to-day operations of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
while the Politburo was charged with the policy-making aspects of the party.
In July 1928, Kosior was appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine. The same year,
the Soviet leadership announced a policy of collectivization, by combining individual
private farms with the collective farms of state property. Each farmer had a certain
number of workdays, for working off of which they were paid for by natural products. However,
mainly the totality of workdays was such that it that denied the opportunity for the farmers
to feed themselves and their families. Speaking to the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in November 1929, Kosior argued that collectivization was the
only way to make progress in agriculture. In February 1930, he declared that Ukraine would
be "completely collectivized in the course of the spring sowing campaign.
Considering Ukrainian farmers’ strong sense of individualism, the collective farm policy
system implementation in Ukraine received much resistance. That is why villagers were forcefully
dragged into collective farms by compulsion, terror and propaganda war with dissenters,
whom the regime marked as “kulaks,” “bourgeois nationalists,” and “counter-revolutionaries,”.
The policy of the Soviet regime provoked such resistance that historians have recorded about
4 thousand farmers’ mass demonstrations in the early 1930s against collectivization,
tax policy, robbery, terror and violence done by authorities in Ukraine.
Because the danger of riots and rebellions for the existence of the Soviet Union was
well aware in Kremlin by Stalin and his associates, the Soviet regime,
not wanting to lose Ukraine, created a plan to exterminate the Ukrainian nation. This
plan was disguised as grain procurement plans to the state and became reality
in 1932 when an unrealistic implementation grain procurement plan, of 356 million poods of grain,
was set for Ukraine. The penalties for failure to comply resulted in complete
removal of all stocks of grain and other food as well as property confiscation.
All the collective property equated to the state property and it was set a severe punishment for
its theft. The state punished hungry farmers for collecting the crop leftovers from fields
with ten years imprisonment with confiscation of property or execution. A specific group of
people was organized to carry out searches among the population to forcefully withdraw the grain.
Those searches were accompanied by terror and physical and psychological abuse of the people.
After Ukraine was turned into the territory of famine, the regime cut off all the ways
to salvation. 22,4 million people were physically locked within the territory of the Great Ukrainian
Famine also known as the Holodomor which literally translated from Ukrainian means
"killing by hunger” or “killing by starvation". Kosior took active part in organizing the
Ukranian Femine. 1 February 1932, he and Vlas Chubar co-signed a decree “On Seed”,
directing local committees to deny any seed aid to Ukraine’s collective farms; on 17 March he
signed a decree “On seed reserves”, which led to increased repression of peasants who were
resisting the confiscation of grain; and on 29 March, he pushed through a decree “On Polissia",
under which 5,000 peasant families were deported from the Polissia region of Ukraine.
In April 1932, after touring the countryside, Kosior wrote to Stalin
to say that there had been trouble from hungry peasants refusing to sow grain,
and delicately requested that food be sent to Ukraine, which prompted an angry rejection,
and seemingly made Stalin suspect that Kosior was not ruthless enough. " When Kosior submitted
a formal request for relief to the Politburo in Moscow, in June, it was turned down flat,
and Stalin's deputy Lazar Kaganovich warned him that his "mistakes" would be held as an
example to other regional party leaders of how not to do their job. Stalin told Kaganovich that
Kosior was "manoeuvring" and engaging in "rotten diplomacy" and being "criminally
frivolous." He considered sacking Kosior and sending Kaganovich in his place. However,
Kosior and his deputy, Pavel Postyshev, met with Stalin and their differences seemed to settle.
In November, Kosior delivered a speech blaming the
trouble in the countryside on Ukrainian nationalists.
The same month on November 18, 1932, to strengthen the famine in Ukraine,
the Politburo adopted a resolution which introduced a specific repressive regime – the
“black boards”. Including into the “black boards” meant physical food blockade of farms, villages,
and districts: total removal of food, ban of trade and transportation of goods,
and ban on leaving for farmers and the surrounding place by military units, state security and
police. In 1932 – 1933 the regime of “black boards” acted in 180 districts of the Soviet
union - 25% area. Such a repressive regime was used only in the areas where Ukrainians lived.
In the spring of 1933, the mortality rate in Ukraine became catastrophic.
The peak of Holodomor fell in June when 28 thousand people died every day. At that time,
Moscow gave Ukraine seed for sowing and food loans. In the cases when food reached villages,
it was provided mainly in form of catering and only to those
collective farmers who were still able to work and live in field conditions.
The Stalinist regime declared famine in Ukraine as a non-existent phenomenon which
was why they refused the assistance offered by many non-governmental organizations,
including foreign Ukrainian communities and the International Red Cross.
Fedir Zadierieyev, witness to the Holodomor genocide, was 99 years old when in 2020 he
recalled: “People in the village began to die from lack of food. Nechai,our neighbour,
ate an unusually large amount of rye porridge on an empty stomach,
and the whole family died. Wandering along the banks of the river in search of something edible,
I repeatedly saw people from neighboring villages who came to pick sorrel stalks,
but often died there, unable to get home. The corpses of the dead remained on the shore for
the whole winter, and only in the spring, when the ice melted, they were thrown into the water.”
He also remembered “When people began to die, the living had neither the strength nor the ability to
bury the dead. Our neighbor came and said to my father: ‘Andrii Fedorovych, my father has died.’
It was necessary to bury him. And winter has come, it was cold. Dad got up from the table and said,
‘I’ve not had a crumb in my mouth for three or four days, I don’t have the strength.’ “
All of that was carried out with large grain stocks, available in the centralized state
reserves and large-scale food exports. At the time when millions of Ukrainians
were dying in severe hunger and agony, the Soviet government exported Ukrainian grain
to other republics of the Soviet Union. The restriction of grain exports in 1931
and its complete cessation in 1932−1933 could have prevented the famine. Moreover,
such decisions in no way influenced the process of industrialization because during this period
world prices on wheat fell down and the Soviet Union received significantly more profits from
the export of timber and oil products. In addition, quite large volumes of grain were
accumulated in the state reserves, but these resources were not used to assist the hungry
Ukrainians which shows the intentional actions for the organization of famine in Ukraine.
Ukrainians died out in families, villages, and records were not always held.
On March 12, 1933 reported from the Russian Secret Service of the Kiev region reported:
“Recently, we have noted a significant increase in
corpse-eating and cannibalism... a mother or father kills a child, eats the meat and
feeds the same meat to their children. “Many make “reserves” and salt meat in barrels,”
Because the communist totalitarian regime did everything possible to conceal the
consequences of its crime, the rate of deaths is unknown. However, a joint statement to the
United Nations signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7–10 million died.
In 1935 Kosior, who in his position was responsible for this atrocity,
was awarded the Order of Lenin "for remarkable success in the field of agriculture".
Between August 1936 and March 1938, the Russian Secret Service or NKVD carried out the Great
Purge which was the imprisonment or execution of a huge number, possibly over a million,
of citizens throughout the Soviet Union as alleged "enemies of the people”.
Upon Stalin’s rise to power, some members of the former Bolshevik party began to question his
authority. An investigation revealed a network of party members supposedly working against Stalin,
including several of Stalin's rivals. By the mid-1930s, Stalin believed anyone with ties
to the Bolsheviks or Lenin’s government was a threat to his leadership and needed to go.
The Great Purge started with the arrests of party members,
Bolsheviks, and members of the Red Army and then grew to include Soviet peasants,
members of the intelligentsia, and members of certain nationalities.
During its mass operations, the NKVD widely utilized imprisonment, torture,
violent interrogation, and arbitrary executions to solidify control over civilians through fear.
By 1938, however, the oppression had become so extensive that it was damaging the infrastructure,
economy and even the armed forces of the Soviet state, prompting Stalin to wind the purge down.
Kosior loyally supported Stalin at the start of the Great Purge and in August 1936 he was one of
eight Soviet leaders to whom the defendants at the first of the Moscow Show Trials, were forced to
confess that they had plotted to assassinate Stalin. Five of the lists of people to be
executed early in the purge were cosigned by him. In January 1938 Kosior was recalled to Moscow,
and replaced by Nikita Khrushchev, who was told by Stalin that Kosior "wasn't doing a good job".
Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that though he objected to the transfer, Stalin overruled him.
Khrushchev liked Kosior. The man who was in his position responsible for millions
of death was according to Khrushchev "a fairly mild-mannered person, pleasant and intelligent".
Though Kosior was appointed head of the Soviet Control Office and deputy prime minister of the
Soviet Union, on 3 May 1938 he was arrested, and stripped of all Party posts. His case was handled
by Boris Rodos, a particularly notorious torturer employed by the NKVD, who was ordered to force
a confession out of him. Kosior withstood brutal torture, including being interrogated for 14 hours
at a time, sleep deprivation and minimal rest but cracked when his sixteen-year-old daughter
was brought into the room and raped in front of him." After he had been broken, he was called to
Stalin's office, to confront Grigory Petrovsky, the Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Central
Executive Committee and the Co-Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union,
who refused to believe that Kosior was guilty. As Petrovsky described the meeting later:
They sat Kosior in a chair. He sat there depressed;
it was obvious he had been through a lot. Kosior said to him: "You know I'm
a Polish spy." ... Then Stalin remarked triumphantly: "There, you see, Petrovsky,
you didn't believe Kosior became a spy. Now do you believe he's an enemy of the people?"
On 26 February 1939 Kosior was sentenced to death by shooting and executed the
same day by General Vasili Blokhin. Kosior’s wife, daughter and son did
not fare any better. Elizaveta, his wife, was arrested on 3 March 1938,
after being accused of being the wife of a counter-revolutionary, and shot on
3 August 1938. Their 16 year old daughter, Tamara who was raped in front of her father,
committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. Kosior's 20 year old son,
Vladimir Stanislavovich died in the Battle of Leningrad in the early days of December 1942.
Kosior’s brother Vladislav was also executed during the purges.
After Stalin's death, Kosior was rehabilitated by
the Soviet government on 14 March 1956. However, in 2010, the Kyiv,
Ukraine Court of Appeal affirmed criminal charges against Kosior with complicity in the Holodomor.
There were no tears shed for Stanisław Kosior.
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