Stanisław Kosior

Stanisław Vikentyevich Kosior (russian: Станислав Викентьевич Косиор, 18 November 1889 – 26 February 1939), sometimes spelled Kossior, was a Soviet politician who was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union and member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He and his wife were both executed during the Great Purge.

In 2010, the Kyiv, Ukraine Court of Appeal affirmed criminal charges against Kosior with complicity in the Holodomor.

Early career

Stanisław Kosior was born in 1889 in Węgrów in the Siedlce Governorate of the Russian Empire, in the region of Podlachia, to a Polish family of humble factory workers. Because of poverty, he migrated east to Yuzovka (modern Donetsk), where he worked at a steel mill. In 1907 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and quickly became the head of the party's local branch. He was arrested and sacked from his job later that year, 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, the Russian secret police, and exiled to Siberia.

After the February Revolution Kosior moved to Petrograd, where he headed the local branch of the Bolsheviks and the Narva municipal committee. After the October Revolution Kosior moved to the German-controlled areas of the Ober-Ost and Ukraine, where he worked for the Bolshevik cause. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he moved back to Russia, where in 1920 he became Secretary of the CPSU. He was head of the Siberian branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from March 1922 to December 1925. In January 1926, he was appointed a Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, working alongside the General Secretary, Joseph Stalin.

Holodomor

In July 1928, Kosior was appointed General Secretary of the Ukrainian SSR Communist Party. His return coincided with Stalin's decision to drive the peasants onto collective farms, a policy Kosior supported. Speaking to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in November 1929, he argued that collectivisation was the only way to make progress in agriculture. In February 1930, he declared that Ukraine would be "completely collectivised in the course of the spring sowing campaign."

In July 1930, he was elevated to the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After the harvest in 1931, Kosior knew that collectivisation was causing a catastrophic fall in agricultural output in Ukraine - visiting Moscow in August, he warned Stalin's deputy, Lazar Kaganovich, that there would be a shortfall of 170 million poods (nearly three million tons) of grain, but Kaganovich blamed the problem on mass theft by Ukrainian peasants and forced Kosior to follow this opinion.

Addressing a plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (of which he had been a member since 1926) he blamed the failure on middle ranking officials and party members who listened to the complaints of peasants that the quotas were too high. "Not only did they not fight; not only did they fail to organise the collective farm masses in the struggle for bread against the class enemy, they often followed along with this peasant mood", he said.

On Stalin's orders, Kosior pushed through a decree “On grain procurements” on 15 January 1932, which increased the power of the central government in Kharkiv

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