February 26, 1939 Turning the pages back... (02/28/99)

February 26, 1939

Turning the pages back...

Among the more complex figures in the Ukrainian Communist movement and early Soviet period was Vlas Chubar, who died 60 years ago on February 26. Both a leader of Ukrainization and yet an opponent of Mykola Khvyliovyi, he was a defender of Ukraine's interests and yet a collaborator in Stalin's genocidal "war on the villages" that was instrumental in causing the Famine of 1932-1933.

Chubar was born on February 22, 1891, in the town of Fedorivka, about 20 miles south of Yelysavethrad (now Kirovohrad), and at the age of 13 traveled to Zaporizhia (then known as Oleksandrivske) to study at a mechanical technical school. At 17 Chubar joined the Bolshevik Party and, after he graduated in 1911, he drifted from job to job in factories in Kramatorsk, Mariupil then Moscow and Petrograd. When the October Revolution broke out, he was in the tsarist empire's capital, at the center of the action At first he served as commissar of the chief artillery administration in the city, then in various posts in the Bolshevik bureaucracy in Russia.

In 1919 Chubar returned to Ukraine, and in short order rocketed to the country's top posts. In 1920 he became chairman of the Organizational Bureau for the Reconstruction of the Industry of Ukraine, of the Supreme Council of the National Economy of the Ukrainian SSR, and a full member of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine's Central Committee. In December 1921 he took over as head of the Donets Basin's Central Administration of Coal Industry, and was a supporter of the New Economic Policy.

Chubar was also counted among Joseph Stalin's team of "indigenizers," those opposed to the internationalist "left" in the Party. On July 16, 1923, he was elected to succeed Khristian Rakovsky as head of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR - the head of the republic's government - thus becoming the first ethnic Ukrainian in the post.Within weeks (the decree on Ukrainizing the school system was issued July 27), thanks to the leadership of Chubar and Education Commissar Oleksander Shumskyi, Ukrainization was in full swing. Chubar almost became the first ethnic Ukrainian party secretary in Ukraine, after Emmanuel Kviring (a dogmatic Volga German) was removed for persisting in his opposition to Ukrainization, but this post was reserved for Stalin's direct representative, Lazar Kaganovich, who arrived in April 1925.

Shumskyi backed Chubar for this office, and favored an even more accelerated pace of "indigenizing" the political apparat and cultural space of the republic. Perhaps to assuage his ambition, Chubar was given a spot on the all-union Politburo as a "candidate member" in 1926.

Chubar now had a vested interest in the revived empire, and late that year and in 1927 turned on his colleague Shumskyi and on Khvyliovyi. Ostensibly he feared that the program of cultural independence from Moscow they were advocating would lead to a separation of the Ukrainian SSR from the Soviet Union. He then turned to the economic matters that were of primary interest to him.

In so doing, he remained a staunch defender of local republican interests, and at the 11th congress of the CP(B)U in Kharkiv in June 1930 he called for Ukrainian government control of union enterprises on the republic's territory.

As the murderous collectivizing juggernaut gathered steam in the summer of 1932, Chubar warned, at a party congress in Kharkiv in July, that the methods and pace of the policy were unrealistic and grain requisition requirements were "too ambitious." However, he remained onside, even as the famine began to rage.

The nadir of his collaboration came on December 6, 1932, when he signed the resolution, dictated by Stalin, "on blacklisting villages that maliciously sabotage the collection of grain," which provided for the strangling of rural Ukraine's access to food and the execution or deportation of those who dared to oppose Stalin's collectivizers.

As historian Robert Conquest wrote, "Even those like ... Chubar, who had expressed doubt, or rather certainty that Moscow's policies would lead to disaster, nevertheless enforced them." In the spring of 1933, he wrote to Stalin "for food at least for the starving children." The reply: "No remarks on that question."

In January 1934, Chubar's transfer out of Ukraine began - he was relieved of his posts with the party's Central Committee and positions of responsibility on the economy. In May, he had lost his position as chairman of the Council of Commissars, and transferred to Moscow as deputy chairman of the USSR Council for Labor and Defense. In 1935, Stalin promoted the beaten and demoralized Chubar to full Politburo membership.

Chubar was arrested in 1937 as the purge of the party was reaching its climax. He was either shot or died in prison (exact location unknown) two years later, on February 26, 1939. Chubar was officially rehabilitated in the 1960s.

Sources: "Chubar, Vlas," "Ukrainization," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vols. 1, 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984, 1993); Robert Conquest, "Harvest of Sorrow" (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1986).

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