Vlas Chubar

Vlas Yakovlevich Chubar (Ukrainian: Влас Якович Чубар; Russian: Вла́с Я́ковлевич Чуба́рь) (22 February [O.S. 10 February] 1891 - 26 February 1939) was a Ukrainian Bolshevik revolutionary and a Soviet politician and one of the organizers of the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine.

Early career

Chubar was born in Fedorovka, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire (now in Polohy Raion, Zaporizhia Oblast, Ukraine). He became a Marxist revolutionary early in life and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1907. He rose through the ranks during the Russian Civil War and becаme a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in 1921. On July 13, 1923 Chubar replaced Christian Rakovsky as Chairman of the Ukrainian Sovnarkom. He became a candidate (non-voting) member of the Central Committee's Politburo in November 1926.

The Great Purge

In 1934 Chubar was transferred to Moscow, where he became Deputy Chairman of the national Council of People's Commissars and Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Labor and Defense. In February 1935 Chubar was made a full member of the Politburo. He briefly served as the Soviet People's Commissar of Finance between August 16, 1937 and January 19, 1938. In 1938 Chubar was appointed the chief of the Solikamsk construction for the GULAG of Soviet Commissariat of Interior. There he was arrested during the Great Purge in June 1938 and executed in February 1939. The Soviet government cleared Chubar of all charges during the first wave of destalinization in 1955.

Holodomor

In 2010, a Ukrainian criminal court concluded that Chubar, along with other leaders of Soviet Ukraine, bore personal responsibility for the Holodomor.