Sukhomlyn, Kyrylo

Sukhomlyn, Kyrylo [Сухомплин, Кирило; Suxomlyn], b 23 May 1886 in Krasnopilia, Krolevets county, Chernihiv gubernia, d 26 August 1938. Communist Party and Soviet government leader. After the 1917–21 Ukrainian-Soviet War he served in Ukraine as head of the Southern Bureau of the Railwaymen’s Union (1921–3), member of the Presidium of the CP(B)U Central Control Commission (CCC, 1923–5) and the CC CP(B)U (1925–38), people's commissar of labor (1925–7), CC CP(B)U Politburo candidate (1926–30) and member (1930–7), chairman of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (1927–32), deputy premier of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR (1932–3, 1935–8) and chairman of the All-Ukrainian Council of Trade Unions (1932–3), CCC chairman and people's commissar of worker-peasant inspection (1933–4), people's commissar of local industry (1935), and chairman of the State Planning Committee of the Ukrainian SSR (1935–8). He was elected a number of times to the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee and its Presidium. Despite his leading role in the Stalinist industrialization drive in Ukraine, he was arrested and executed during the Yezhov terror.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 5 (1993).]