Petrovsky, Hryhorii

Petrovsky, Hryhorii [Petrovs’kyi, Hryhorij], b 4 February 1878 in Kharkiv, d 9 January 1958 in Moscow. (Photo: Hryhorii Petrovsky)Soviet state official and Party leader. During the revolution he served as people's commissar of internal affairs of the RSFSR and then chaired the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee (1919–38) and the All-Ukrainian Central Committee of Poor Peasants (Komnezam) (1920–33). He was a long-term member of the Politburo of the CP(B)U (1920–38). Petrovsky belonged to the Bolshevik majority that opposed the Ukrainian national-communist orientation represented by Yurii Lapchynsky and Oleksander Shumsky, although in the 1920s he supported Ukrainization and defended Ukraine's economic, cultural, and political rights against growing centralization. After the purge of the Politburo of the CP(B)U he was removed from Ukraine (1938) and appointed deputy director of the USSR Museum of the Revolution in Moscow. In 1926 the city of Katerynoslav was renamed Dnipropetrovsk in his honour.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]