In 1929, Joseph Stalin stood victorious over his political rivals and set out to transform the Soviet Union from a largely agrarian country into an industrial power. His instrument was forced collectivization, a brutal program that compelled millions of peasants to surrender their land and join state-controlled farms. Those who resisted were branded enemies of the socialist system, their property confiscated, and they were exiled to the Gulag. Grain was seized from farms to feed the growing cities and meet the quotas set by Moscow.
Nowhere were the consequences more devastating than in Soviet Ukraine, one of the richest agricultural regions in the union. Impossible grain quotas, the confiscation of food, travel restrictions, and the punishment of entire villages turned a severe agricultural crisis into the Holodomor, a man-made famine of 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. These policies were ordered by Stalin and the Soviet leadership in Moscow, but they relied on officials in Ukraine to carry them out. Among those responsible was the head of the government of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
His name was Vlas Chubar. Chubar was born on February 22, 1891, in the village of Fedorivka, then part of the Russian Empire and today in southern Ukraine. He came from a family of ethnic Ukrainian peasants, the children of poor, illiterate landowners. At the age of thirteen, he was arrested and beaten by the gendarmes for belonging to a secret group during the revolution of 1905.
Between 1904 and 1911 he studied at the mechanical technical school in Oleksandrivsk, the city known today as Zaporizhzhia, and in 1907 he joined the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. After leaving school, he worked in factories in Kramatorsk, Mariupol, and Moscow, which gave him the status of an authentic Bolshevik worker that the party valued. In May 1915, during the First World War, he was mobilized into the Imperial Russian Army, but as a skilled worker he was sent to a military factory in Petrograd. The revolutions of 1917 pulled him out of the workshop.
During the October Revolution he was appointed commissar of the main artillery administration in Petrograd, and in the years that followed he rose rapidly through the economic machinery of the new Bolshevik state. From the end of 1920 he headed the Ukrainian Supreme Economic Council and oversaw the building of Ukrainian industry. From late 1921 he managed the central administration of the coal industry in the Donbas. By temperament and training he was an administrator of factories and mines, not a theoretician.
Moscow valued him in that capacity. In July 1923, Chubar reached the top of the Ukrainian government when he became chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR, effectively prime minister of Soviet Ukraine. He held that position for more than a decade while also serving as deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union in Moscow. In November 1926 he became a candidate member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was the party’s highest executive body.
He was the first ethnic Ukrainian to reach that level and for years the only one. In the mid-1920s he headed the Ukrainization committee, a policy aimed at promoting the Ukrainian language and culture within the republic’s institutions, and he pressed for Ukraine to have greater control over federal enterprises on its territory. To many, he seemed the embodiment of a distinct Ukrainian Bolshevism: loyal to Moscow, yet concerned with the republic he governed. That loyalty to Moscow proved the stronger force.
When Stalin moved to break the peasantry through forced collectivization, Chubar supported him. He backed Stalin against Leon Trotsky, and at the Central Committee session in November 1929 he was among those who attacked Nikolai Bukharin and other opponents of forced collectivization. In March 1930 he noted with apparent satisfaction that 63 percent of peasant households in Ukraine had already been pushed into collective farms. On February 1, 1932, despite evidence that the policy was causing a catastrophic decline in agricultural production and mass famine, Chubar and Stanislav Kosior, the party leader in Ukraine, jointly signed an order titled “On Seeds,” directing party committees to deprive collective farms in Ukraine of any seed assistance.
The two men’s signatures appeared again and again on documents that turned the forced collectivization campaign into a machine of death. Chubar did not act in ignorance of what collectivization was doing. He traveled to the countryside and saw the results for himself. On June 10, 1932, he wrote directly to Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, then chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, warning that tens of thousands of undernourished, bloated people were dying of famine in every village.
Days later, with the support of the Ukrainian Politburo, he sent a telegram to Moscow begging for grain to feed Ukraine. Stalin’s reply was contemptuous. He wrote that Chubar was wrong, that Ukraine had received more than it should, and that there was no reason to give more grain and no place to take it from. Stalin had enough grain to save the population.
He chose not to. The pleas from Ukraine did not move the Kremlin. They angered it. On July 2, 1932, Stalin ordered Lazar Kaganovich and Molotov to deal with what he called Chubar’s corruption and opportunism.
At the Third Ukrainian Party Conference in Kharkiv in early July 1932, Chubar dared to argue publicly that the pace and methods of collectivization were unrealistic and that the grain collection plan was far too ambitious. It was as close to opposition as a member of the Ukrainian communist leadership could come, and it changed nothing. The quota imposed on Ukraine for 1932 was nearly 6 million tons, a figure beyond any realistic estimate of the harvest, and Moscow insisted on it. After registering his objections and being rejected, Chubar enforced the very policy he had warned would end in catastrophe, signing a decree on grain purchase quotas that set collective farms an utterly unrealistic target.
These deadly measures intensified steadily through the autumn and winter of 1932. On November 11, Chubar jointly signed instructions authorizing the complete confiscation of crops, seizure of land, deportation of failing peasants, and the notorious “blacklist” system, which placed entire villages under embargo and cut them off from all trade, effectively a death sentence by starvation. In December, Chubar clashed with Kaganovich, the former first secretary of the Communist Party in Ukraine, whom Stalin had sent back because of complaints that fines were not being collected from peasants who failed to deliver grain. Chubar argued weakly that the peasants were too poor to have anything left to confiscate.
Rejected again, he arranged in December 1932 for decrees from the Ukrainian Council of People’s Commissars banning the sale of potatoes, meat, and livestock in the Chernihiv, Kyiv, and Vinnytsia regions, which had been accused of failing to meet their quotas. The ban removed one of the last remaining sources of food, and according to a later court ruling, amounted to killing by starvation. This was the enduring contradiction at the heart of Chubar’s record during the Holodomor. He looked at the starving countryside, described it accurately in private sessions, and begged for it to be fed.
Then he signed the orders that sealed its fate. Chubar, who expressed his certainty that Moscow’s policies would lead to disaster, nevertheless carried them out voluntarily. He was not the architect of the famine, which was decided in the Kremlin, nor an unwitting observer. He was an instrument that understood fully what it was doing and did it anyway.
By some estimates, his decisions cost the lives of at least 3. 5 million Ukrainians. In 1934, as the famine in Ukraine finally receded, Chubar was transferred to Moscow. The move was in fact a sign of Stalin’s waning trust, though it was disguised as a promotion.
He became deputy chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union and of the Council of Labour and Defence. In February 1935 he was promoted to full membership in the Politburo, and from 1937 he also served as People’s Commissar of Finance of the Soviet Union. To an outside observer, he stood at the summit of the Soviet state. In reality, he had entered the first stage of his own destruction.
The terror Stalin was building would consume almost the entire old Bolshevik elite, and Chubar was among the first to fall. The Great Terror soon caught up with him as it did most of the old Bolshevik elite. In January 1938 Chubar was removed from the Finance Commissariat, and in June of that year he was sent to the Urals to head the Solikamsk construction project. Shortly after his arrival on July 4, 1938, he was arrested.
The charges were the usual fabrications of the era: anti-Soviet activity, terrorism, and sabotage. There was no meaningful defense and none was allowed. On February 26, 1939, the 48-year-old Chubar was sentenced to death. He was executed by firing squad later that same day.
The Ukrainian politician who had imposed starvation on his own republic was destroyed by the state he had served, condemned not for the real crime of famine but for imaginary conspiracies invented by his comrades. On August 24, 1955, during the first thaw of de-Stalinization, the Soviet authorities quietly rehabilitated Chubar, clearing him of the charges for which he had been executed as part of Khrushchev’s efforts to restore the reputations of purged Bolsheviks. The rehabilitation concerned only the fabricated crimes of 1938. No mention was made of the famine, and the reckoning over that was much slower.
It finally came in January 2010, when the Court of Appeal in Kyiv, in a criminal case brought by the Security Service of Ukraine, ruled that the Holodomor was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people and named those responsible. Alongside Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Postyshev, Kosior, and Khataevich, the court named Vlas Chubar. The ruling was based in part on the very decrees he had signed, which the court considered calculated to bring about the physical destruction of part of the Ukrainian nation. None of the accused could hear the verdict.
They had all been dead for decades, and Chubar himself had been shot 71 years before the judgment was delivered.