Pavel Petrovich Postyshev

Pavel Petrovich Postyshev

Pavel Petrovich Postyshev (1934)

Pavel Postyshev ( Russian Павел Петрович Постышев , born September 6 ^{. Jul} / 18th September  1887 ^greg. In Ivanovo-Voznesensk ; †  26. February 1939 , according to other sources 10. November 1940 , in Kuibyshev ) was a Soviet politician.

Beginnings

Postyshev was the son of a weaver. In 1901 he joined the revolutionary movement and in 1904 the RSDRP . Two years later, he was on the board of the Calico Printers Union and the party's city committee.

far East

Arrested in 1908, he was exiled to the Siberian Irkutsk Oblast , where he was again a member of the RSDRP from 1914–17. In the year of the revolution he became their deputy and a member of the military committee and the trade union headquarters. In 1918 he became a member of the Revolutionary Tribunal, the government of Central Siberia and representative of the Far East in the Council of People's Commissars . It is also possible that Postyshev took part in the Polish-Soviet war and met Isaac Babel there .

He is considered to be one of the organizers of the “ red terror ” in Siberia and the Far East, to which atrocities are ascribed even among the Bolsheviks . In 1920 he was a representative of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Russia (B), KPR (B), in the Khabarovsk region and in 1921/22 the government of the Far Eastern Republic (ДВР) in the Pribaikal region (west of Lake Baikal ). At that time he was on the Military College of the Eastern Front of the Russian Civil War and co-founder of the Institute of Military Commissars of the Far East Army . Postyshev organized the "Assault of the Red Army on Volochayevka", which is mentioned in the song Partisans of the Amur . At the end of 1922 he became regional commissioner of the Far Eastern Republic in Verkhneudinsk .

Ukraine

Starting as "organizational instructor" of Kiev KP he rose in the years 1924-30 by the local party secretary for candidates of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR and continues as a member and most recently Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party as well as employees of Orgbüros in Moscow. Here he directed 1930–33 a. a. the propaganda department.

At the 12th party congress of the Ukrainian Communist Party, he gave a lecture on the situation. He subsequently worked as the main organizer of the repression of the Ukrainian intelligentsia (1932–37) because of “ nationalism ” and consequently became a candidate for the Politburo of the CP Central Committee on February 1, 1934 . Postyshev "purged" the Ukrainian Communist Party of so-called nationalists, who were arrested and partly executed with the help of falsified evidence, so that two thirds of the members were removed in the end; accompanied by the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. According to another source, Khrushchev , who later “inherited” him in this capacity (and also as a candidate for the Politburo), is said to have accelerated the purges that Postyshev tried to slow down. At that time Isaac Babel was visiting the collective farms of Ukraine and Postyshev provided him with two cars.

In the " Moscow Trial of 16" against the "United Center of the Trotskyist-Zinovievist counterrevolutionary bloc" in 1936, Zinoviev and Kamenev were defeated for planning an attack and the like. a. sentenced to Postyshev.

Appointed representative of the Supreme Court of the USSR in 1937 , Postyshev was sent to the party in Kuibyshev . A local party conference under his leadership analyzed the "pest work" of " enemies of the people " and their supposedly insufficient persecution by the various party branches, so that as a result 110 area secretaries were arrested and 30 district party committees were dissolved. Khrushchev wrote in his memoir that Postyshev was "the kind of person who sometimes exaggerated the tone with inadmissible rudeness."

January plenary session 1938

Soviet postage stamp from 1968 with the portrait of Postyshev

At the plenum of the Central Committee of the WKP (B) in Moscow on January 14, 1938, Georgi Malenkov gave a lecture "On the mistakes of the party organizations in the exclusion of communists from the party". He criticized "the high number of excluded party members and sentenced citizens without there being lists of names of these people, but only lists of numbers". The plenary session resolved the end of "unfounded mass exclusions from the party". The Politburo had previously ruled on January 9 that Postyshev's actions in Kuibyshev had been "politically harmful" and "provocative".

Postyshev was also removed from the list of candidates for the Politburo for commenting that "there is not a single honest member in all party organizations", expelled from the party soon after and on February 21, 1938, according to other sources on February 26 1938, arrested. He was convicted of diversion , conspiracy, espionage, and deviation from Leninism and shot in 1939 or 1940.

Posthumously

Postyshev's youngest son Vladimir was imprisoned in Knjaschpogost, Komi , in 1941 as a "family member of a traitor to the fatherland" (TschSIR) .

In 1956, PP Postyshev was rehabilitated. A street in Vladivostok is named after him. Today's city of Pokrovsk in the Ukraine was called "Postyshevo" after him from 1934 to 1938. 1935 was a region of Primorye "Postyschewski" which was three years later renamed "Krasnoarmeski". A daily newspaper that was to be called "Postyshevets" was renamed "Bolshevik" at the last minute.

The Christmas tree

Postyshev is still known today in Russia for his "rehabilitation of the Christmas tree". In the 1920s, had Komsomol a campaign against " bourgeois degeneration" and " priest - obscurantism " led Christian Christmas celebrations. Since the corresponding trade could not be stopped, in 1927 the focus was on the Christmas tree with political satire (among other things, the poet Simeon Kirsanov wrote a mocking poem) and caricatures. After many years of anti-religious campaign, Pravda published a letter from Postyshev on December 28, 1936, which was supposed to make "the pleasure of the rich from pre-revolutionary times possible for all children as a Soviet Christmas tree in public buildings". There was no Politburo decision on this; Postyshev had personally discussed the "rehabilitation", which was picked up across the country, with Stalin. It went hand in hand with a social change: the abolition of ration cards in 1935, the beginning of the production of Russian sparkling wine and the re-approval of jazz and foxtrot.

media

• Pawel Postyshev: Marxist-Leninist education . Moscow-Leningrad: Publishing Cooperative of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1933.
• Vadim Sakharovich Rogovin : Was there an alternative 5. The party of the executed . Workers press. 1998. ISBN 3886340724
• Film: password unnecessary . (Russian: PAROL NJE NUSHEN), USSR, Gorki-Studio. 1967. R: Boris Grigorjew, D: Michail Fjodorow as Postyshev

supporting documents

1. ^ ^{A b} Paul Robert Magocsi, A History of Ukraine , Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996, ISBN 0-8020-0830-5
2. ↑ ^{a b} Der Spiegel : He Will Slaughter Us All - Stalin's Great Purge
3. ↑ Reinhard Krumm: '' Isaak Babel ''. Rowohlt, Reinbek; 2003
4. ↑ Proletarian (Charkow 1934), No.15-21. Quoted from WED Allen: The Ukraine, Cambridge 1940, p. 326.
5. ↑ Holmberg, Nils, Friedliche Konterrevolution, Oberbaumverlag Berlin 1974, Part I, p. 34
6. ↑ Judgment of the trial of August 23, 1936, Stalinwerke ( Memento of the original of May 19, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ^ Memorial, "The Great Terror": 1937-1938. Short chronicle
8. ↑ http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/deu/Dokument/Memuar/noname4.htm Memorial, from the memories of a TschSIR
9. ↑ Tamara КАЛИБЕРОВА: Улица Постышева празднует именины. In "Vladivostok" 2205/2007
10. ↑ Radio Free Europe: Елка, фокстрот и шампанское, January 2005

Web links

Commons : Pavel Postyshev  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Pawel Petrowitsch Postyshev in the catalog of the German National Library