Kotsiubynsky, Yurii

Kotsiubynsky, Yurii [Коцюбинський, Юрій; Kocjubyns’kyj, Jurij], b 7 December 1896 in Vinnytsia, d 8 March 1937. Soviet political figure; the son of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. He joined the Bolshevik party in 1914. In 1917 he was a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee; he became secretary for military affairs in the first Soviet Ukrainian government in Kharkiv (1917–18) and the commander of the Red Army in Ukraine (1918). A diplomat from 1920, he represented Soviet Ukraine in Austria (1921–2) and was consul there and in Poland (1927–30). He was deputy chairman (1930–4) and chairman (1934–6) of the State Planning Committee of the Ukrainian SSR, and a member of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. He was arrested in April 1936 and shot without trial for being a ‘leader of a Ukrainian Trotskyist Center.’ He was rehabilitated posthumously in the 1960s. Two biographies of him, by A. Yaroshenko (1977) and Ivan Tsiupa (1966), were published in Kyiv.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]