Kosior, Stanislav

Kosior, Stanislav [Косьор, Станіслав], b 18 November 1889 in Węgrów, Poland, d 26 February 1939. Soviet state and Party official. A Donbas worker who was active in the Bolshevik underground in Ukraine before the Revolution of 1917, he became a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee in 1917. From 1918 he held several important state, Party, and military posts in Ukraine, including membership in the CP(B)U Politburo. After a stint in the Siberian party organization and in Moscow (1922–8), he returned to Ukraine and was general secretary (1928–34) and first secretary (1934–8) of the CP(B)U. Under Kosior’s administration, during which the second secretary Pavel Postyshev had a great influence, Ukraine suffered a shift in policy from Ukrainization to Russification, forced collectivization of the peasantry, the Famine-Genocide of 1932–3, the Stalinist terror, and the physical destruction of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Transferred in 1938 to Moscow, Kosior was himself arrested and shot in 1939. He was rehabilitated posthumously in the 1960s.

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