Stanislaw Wikentjewitsch Kossior

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Stanislaw Wikentjewitsch Kossior

Stanislaw Wikentjewitsch Kossior (Russian Станислав Викентьевич Косиор ; * 6 November July / 18 November  1889 greg. In Węgrów , in the congress Polish governorate of Siedlce of the Russian Empire ; † February 26, 1939 ) was a Soviet politician . He is considered to be one of those responsible for the famine of 1932–1933, also known as the Holodomor in Ukraine . He was executed during the Stalin Purge .

biography

Early years

Kossior was the son of a simple migrant worker of Polish descent who had found a job in Węgrów. He and his two well-known brothers Wladislaw Kossior (1891-1938) and Iossif Kossior (1893-1937) were active as communists in the USSR and fell victim to the Stalinist purges , but not the other brothers Kazimierz and Michal. The family moved to the Jusowka ( Donetsk ) coalfield looking for work , where he was employed as a steel worker. In 1907 he joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Russia and belonged to the Bolshevik faction that was formed in 1903 . Soon he was the leader of the local party organization. In 1913 he came to Moscow and from there he was posted to Kiev and Kharkov as the leader of the illegal, socialist party cells there. In 1915 the Tsarist secret police , the Ochrana , arrested him and deported him to Siberia .

Rise during and after the revolution

After the February Revolution of 1917 , Kossior was a member of the Narva city ​​party committee . After the October Revolution of 1917 and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks , on behalf of the party, his area of ​​operations was relocated to the German-controlled areas of Upper East and the Ukraine. After the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk , Kossior worked as party secretary for the party in Russia. From 1919 to 1920 he succeeded Georgi Pyatakov as first party secretary and member of the central committee of the party organization in the emerging Ukrainian Soviet Republic . In 1922 he became secretary of the Siberian office of the Central Committee.

At the center of power

From 1925 to 1928 he was secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union - CPSU . From 1928 to January 1938 he was again (as the successor to Lasar Kaganowitsch ) First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine .

In 1930 Stalin won the power struggle against Bukharin and Tomsky , who were deposed as members of the Politburo, and against Rykov , who lost his post as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars and as a member of the Politburo . As a supporter of Stalin, Kossior became a full member of the highest political body in the USSR, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, from 1930 to 1938 . In 1935 he received the Order of Lenin , the highest honor in the Soviet Union.

In January 1938, Nikita Khrushchev became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine. Kossior went to Moscow as deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. It didn't look like a punitive transfer, but his fate had already been decided.
In the Council of People's Commissars he encountered the concentrated opposition of the Stalinists. They included Prime Minister Molotov and his deputy Mikoyan . Kossior and Deputy Prime Minister Tschubar took a moderate line, but achieved nothing.

Stalin's victims

Postage stamp of the Soviet Union , Stanislaw Kossior, 1989 (Michel 6001, Scott 5812)

Stalin used an incorrect denunciation from Kiev to eliminate his supporter Kossior. Kossior was a confidante of the failure of Stalin and the party and was also responsible for the famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s . Stalin brought charges against Kossior; Kossior lost all party positions on May 3, 1938 and was arrested by the NKVD. He withstood brutal torture and collapsed when his sixteen-year-old daughter was brought into the room and raped in front of his eyes. As part of the Stalinist purges under NKVD boss Yezhov 1938, the Politburo members were beside Kossior Rudzutak , Chubar and the candidates of the Politburo Postyshev and oak indicted. Kossior, Tschubar and Postyshev were sentenced to death on February 26, 1939 and executed on the same day . The body was not handed over to the relatives, but cremated in the then only Moscow crematorium (it had been in operation in a converted church on the Donskoy cemetery since 1927 ) and the ashes were thrown into a mass grave there. His two brothers had also been executed beforehand in 1937/38. With them, the vast majority of the members and candidates of the Central Committee disappeared.
Khrushchev said in his secret speech on February 25, 1956 , almost three years after Stalin's death, at the end of the 20th party congress of the CPSU :

We have now investigated the Kosior, Rudzutak, Postyšev, Kosarev and others cases and rehabilitated these comrades. On what basis had she been arrested and sentenced? The examination of the documents showed that there was no basis for this. [...] Stalin not only gave permission, he even gave instructions for arrests on his own initiative. [...] The facts show that many abuses took place on the instructions of Stalin, without observing any norms of party and Soviet legality. Stalin was a very suspicious person with morbid suspicions, of which we who worked with him could convince ourselves. [...] The morbid suspicion aroused indiscriminate suspicion in him, including in relation to prominent party officials whom he had known for many years. Everywhere, at every turn, he saw "enemies", "double-talkers" and "spies".

literature

Web links

Commons : Stanislaw Kosior  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Der Spiegel 8/1971: "He will slaughter us all" (based on Robert Conquest (1968): The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties , ISBN 978-0-19-505580-1 ); this was published in German translation in 1970: At the beginning, Comrade Kirov died. Purges under Stalin . Droste 1970 (Droste paperback 1984, ISBN 3-7700-0225-3 ).
  2. ↑ Orlando Figes (2007): The Whisperers , Allen Lane, London, ISBN 0-312-42803-0 , p. 248
  3. ^ Robert Conquest: The Great Terror: A Reassessment . Pimlico 2008, ISBN 978-1-84595-144-3 .
  4. ↑ www.1000dokumente.de: full text of the speech in German translation
personal data
SURNAME Kossior, Stanislaw Wikentjewitsch
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Косиор, Станислав Викентьевич (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION soviet politician
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Węgrów
DATE OF DEATH February 26, 1939