In 1929, Joseph Stalin defeated his political rivals and became the principal leader of the Soviet Union. Determined to transform a largely agricultural country into an industrial power, he launched a vast program of forced collectivization.
Millions of peasants were compelled to give up their land and join state-controlled collective farms. Those who resisted were branded enemies of the socialist order. Their property was confiscated, and they were exiled to the Gulag, the Soviet forced-labor camp system.
At the same time, grain was seized from farms to feed growing cities and to meet quotas set in Moscow. Nowhere were the consequences more devastating than in Soviet Ukraine, one of the richest agricultural regions of the Soviet Union.
Impossible grain quotas, food confiscations, travel restrictions, and the punishment of entire villages turned a severe agricultural crisis into the Holodomor, a man-made famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933.
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 officials was the head of the government of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. His name was Vlas Chubar.
Vlas Yakovych Chubar was born on February 22, 1891, or February 10 under the old Russian calendar, in the village of Fedorivka, then part of the Russian Empire and now in southern Ukraine.
He came from an ethnic Ukrainian peasant family, and his parents were illiterate small landowners. At the age of thirteen, he was arrested and beaten by gendarmes for belonging to a secret group during the 1905 revolution.
Between 1904 and 1911, he studied at the mechanical technical school in Oleksandrivsk, the city of Zaporizhzhia in present-day Ukraine. 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 credential of a genuine Bolshevik worker that the party valued.
In May 1915, during World War I, which had begun in the summer of 1914, he was drafted into the Russian Imperial Army. As a skilled worker, however, he was sent to a military factory in Petrograd.
The revolutions of 1917 in Russia brought him out of the workshop. During the October Revolution, he was appointed commissar in charge of the Main Artillery Directorate in Petrograd.
In the years that followed, he rose quickly through the economic machinery of the new Bolshevik state. From the end of 1920, he headed the Supreme Ukrainian Council of the National Economy and oversaw the building of Ukrainian industry.
From late 1921, he ran the central administration of the coal industry in the Donbas. By temperament and training, he was an administrator of factories and mines, not an ideological theorist. In that role as an economic manager, Moscow valued him.
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 becoming prime minister of Soviet Ukraine.
He held that position for more than a decade, while also serving as a 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, in effect the highest executive authority in the party. Chubar was the first ethnic Ukrainian to reach that level, and for years he remained the only one to do so.
In the mid-1920s, he chaired the Ukrainization commission, 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 distinctive Ukrainian Bolshevism, loyal to Moscow yet attentive to the republic he governed. That loyalty to Moscow, in the end, was the stronger force.
When Stalin set out to break the resistance of the peasantry through forced collectivization, Chubar was among its supporters. He backed Stalin against Trotsky, another important Bolshevik leader, and at a Central Committee session in November 1929, he was among those who attacked Nikolai Bukharin and opponents of forced collectivization.
In March 1930, he noted with apparent satisfaction that 63 percent of peasant households in Ukraine had already been pushed to join collective farms.
On February 1, 1932, despite evidence that the policy was causing a catastrophic drop in agricultural production and mass starvation, Chubar and Stanislav Kosior, the party leader in Ukraine, jointly signed an order titled "On Seeds."
The order directed regional and district party committees to deny collective farms in Ukraine any seed assistance. The signatures of the two men appeared together repeatedly 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 people suffering from malnutrition and bloating were dying of starvation in every village.
Days later, with the backing of the Ukrainian Politburo, he sent a telegram to Moscow pleading for grain to feed Ukraine. Stalin's response was full of contempt.
"Chubar is wrong," Stalin wrote. "Ukraine has received more than it should have received." There was no reason to give more grain and nowhere to take it from, he said.
It was clear that Stalin wanted Ukrainians to die, despite the fact that he had enough grain to save the population. Ukraine's appeals did not move the Kremlin. They angered it.
On July 2, 1932, Stalin ordered Lazar Kaganovich and Vyacheslav 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 openly that the pace and methods of collectivization were unrealistic and that the grain collection plan was far too ambitious.
It was as close as a member of the Ukrainian communist leadership could come to opposition, but it changed nothing. Ukraine's imposed quota for 1932 reached nearly 6 million tons, a figure beyond any realistic estimate of the harvest, and Moscow insisted it be fulfilled.
After registering his doubts and being rebuffed, Chubar enforced the very policy he had warned would end in disaster, signing a decree on grain procurement quotas that set collective farms a completely 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, the seizure of land, and the deportation of peasants who fell short.
The instructions also included the notorious "blacklist" system, which placed entire villages under blockade and cut them off from all trade, in effect a death sentence by starvation for the villages affected.
In December, Chubar clashed with Lazar Kaganovich, the former first secretary of the Communist Party in Ukraine, whom Stalin had sent back to Ukraine over 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. After his view was rejected once again, in December 1932 he arranged for decrees of 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 falling short of their quotas.
The ban removed one of the last remaining sources of food and, as a later court put it, amounted to killing by starvation.
This is the persistent 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. He then 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, but an instrument who fully understood what he was doing and still did it.
By one estimate, his decisions cost at least 3.5 million Ukrainian lives.
In 1934, as the famine in Ukraine finally receded, Chubar was transferred to Moscow. The move was in fact a sign of Stalin's declining trust in him, though it was dressed up as a promotion.
He became a deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and of the Council of Labor and Defense. 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 pinnacle of the Soviet state. In reality, he had entered the first stage of his own destruction. The terror Stalin was building would devour almost the entire old Bolshevik elite, and Chubar was among the first to fall.
The Great Terror, Stalin's campaign of political repression and mass killing, soon reached Chubar, as it reached most of the old Bolshevik elite. In January 1938, he was removed from the finance commissariat, and in June of that year he was sent to the Ural Mountains to head the Solikamsk construction project.
Shortly after his arrival, on July 4, 1938, he was arrested. The charges were the usual slanders of the era: anti-Soviet activity, terrorism, and sabotage. There was no meaningful defense, and none was allowed.
On February 26, 1939, Vlas Chubar, aged 48, was sentenced to death. He was shot later that same day. The Ukrainian politician who had starved his republic was destroyed by the state he served, condemned not for the real crime of the famine but for invented plots fabricated by his comrades.
On August 24, 1955, during the first thaw of de-Stalinization, Soviet authorities quietly rehabilitated Chubar and cleared him of the charges for which he had been executed, as part of Khrushchev-era efforts to restore the reputations of purged Bolsheviks.
The rehabilitation concerned only the fabricated crimes of 1938. The famine was not mentioned, and the reckoning for it came much more slowly.
That reckoning finally came in January 2010, when the Kyiv Court of Appeals, in a criminal case brought by the Ukrainian security service, ruled that the Holodomor was an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people and named those responsible.
Alongside Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Postyshev, Kosior, and Khatayevich, the court named Vlas Chubar. The ruling was based in part on the very decrees he had signed, which the court considered calculated to cause material destruction of part of the Ukrainian nation.
None of the accused could hear the verdict. All had been dead for decades, and Chubar himself had been shot 71 years before the ruling was issued.