Stanisław Vikentyevich Kosior (Russian:Станислав Викентьевич Косиор; 18 November 1889 – 26 February 1939), sometimes spelledKossior, was a Soviet politician who wasFirst Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine,Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union and member of thePolitburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He and his wife were both executed during theGreat Purge.

Stanisław Kosior
Станислав Косиор
Kosior in 1920
First Secretary of theCommunist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine
In office 14 July 1928 – 27 January 1938
Preceded by	Lazar Kaganovich
Succeeded by	Nikita Khrushchev
In office 25 March 1920 – 17 October 1920
Preceded by	Nikolay Bestchetvertnoi
Succeeded by	Vyacheslav Molotov
In office 30 May 1919 – 10 December 1919
Preceded by	Georgiy Pyatakov
Succeeded by	Rafail Farbman
Full member of the16th and17thPolitburo
In office 13 July 1930 – 3 May 1938
Candidate member of the15th Politburo
In office 19 December 1927 – 13 July 1930
Full member of the14th,15thSecretariat
In office 1 January 1926 – 12 July 1928
Personal details
Born	Stanislav Vikentyevich Kosior (1889-11-18)18 November 1889 Węgrów,Siedlce Governorate,Russian Empire (nowPoland)
Died	26 February 1939(1939-02-26) (aged 49) Moscow,Soviet Union
Citizenship	Russian Empire(subject) Soviet Union
Political party	RSDLP (Bolsheviks)(1907–1918) Russian Communist Party (1918–1938)
Spouse	Yelizaveta Sergeyevna
Children	Tamara and Vladimir
Alma mater	Sulin industrial elementary school
Signature

Stanisław Kosior was born in 1889 inWęgrów in theSiedlce Governorate of theRussian Empire, in the region ofPodlachia, to aPolish family of humble factory workers. Because ofpoverty, he migrated east toYuzovka (modernDonetsk), where he worked at asteel mill. In 1907 he joined theRussian Social Democratic Labour Party and quickly became the head of the party's local branch. He was arrested and sacked from his job later that year, and the following year felt obliged to leave the area due to police activity. He used connections to get re-appointed at the Sulin factory in 1909 but was soon arrested again and deported to the Pavlovsk mine.^[1] In 1913, he was transferred toMoscow and then toKyiv andKharkiv, where he organized local communist cells. In 1915, he was arrested by theOkhrana, the Russian secret police, and exiled toSiberia.

After theFebruary Revolution Kosior moved toPetrograd, where he headed the local branch of theBolsheviks and theNarva municipal committee. After theOctober Revolution Kosior moved to the German-controlled areas of theOber-Ost and Ukraine, where he worked for the Bolshevik cause. After theTreaty of Brest-Litovsk, he moved back to Russia, where in 1920, he became Secretary of theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union. He was head of the Siberian branch of the CPSU from March 1922 to December 1925. In January 1926, he was appointed aSecretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, working alongside the General Secretary,Joseph Stalin.

In July 1928, Kosior was appointedGeneral Secretary of the Ukrainian SSR Communist Party. His return coincided with Stalin'sdecision to drive the peasants onto collective farms, a policy Kosior supported. Speaking to theCentral Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in November 1929, he argued that collectivisation was the only way to make progress inagriculture. In February 1930, he declared that Ukraine would be "completely collectivised in the course of the spring sowing campaign."^[2]

In July 1930, he was elevated to thePolitburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. After the harvest in 1931, Kosior knew that collectivisation was causing a catastrophic fall in agricultural output in Ukraine – visiting Moscow in August, he warned Stalin's deputy,Lazar Kaganovich, that there would be a shortfall of 170 millionpoods (nearly three million tons) of grain, but Kaganovich blamed the problem on mass theft by Ukrainian peasants and forced Kosior to follow this opinion.^[3][4]

Addressing a plenum of theCentral Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (of which he had been a member since 1926) he blamed the failure on middle ranking officials and party members who listened to the complaints of peasants that the quotas were too high. "Not only did they not fight; not only did they fail to organise the collective farm masses in the struggle for bread against the class enemy, they often followed along with this peasant mood", he said.^[5]

On Stalin's orders, Kosior pushed through a decree "On grain procurements" on 15 January 1932, which increased the power of the central government inKharkiv to direct the confiscation of grain in the regions. The fact that he imposed this measure, "in spite of starvation in Ukrainian villages", was the first several examples cited by the Kyiv Court of Appeal in its 2010 resolution that judged Kosior to have been complicit in genocide.^[6] The court also recorded that on 1 February, he andVlas Chubar co-signed a decree "On Seed", directing local committees to deny any seed aid to Ukraine's collective farms; on 17 March he signed a decree "On seed reserves", which led to increased repression of peasants who were resisting the confiscation of grain; and on 29 March, he pushed through a decree "On Polissia", under which 5,000 peasant families were deported from thePolissia region of Ukraine.^[6]

In April 1932, after touring the countryside, Kosior wrote to Stalin to say that there had been trouble from hungry peasants refusing to sow grain, and delicately requested that food be sent to Ukraine, which prompted an angry rejection, and seemingly made Stalin suspect that Kosior was not ruthless enough.^[7] "The worst aspect of this situation is Kosior's silence," he told Kaganovich, when other leading Ukrainian communists pleaded for help. When Kosior submitted a formal request for relief to the Politburo in Moscow, in June, it was turned down flat, and Kaganovich warned him his "mistakes" would be held as an example to other regional party leaders of how not to do their job. This was because Kosior's attempt to find an accommodation between Moscow's demands and the crisis in the countryside had turned Stalin against him. He told Kaganovich that Kosior was "manoeuvring" and engaging in "rotten diplomacy" and being "criminally frivolous." He considered sacking Kosior and sending Kaganovich in his place.^[8] However, Kosior and his deputy,Pavel Postyshev, met Stalin, who agreed to reduce Ukraine's grain quota. That seemed to settle their differences.

In November, Kosior delivered a speech blaming the trouble in the countryside on Ukrainian nationalists.^[9] In 1935, he was awarded theOrder of Lenin "for remarkable success in the field of agriculture".^[10]

Kosior loyally supportedJoseph Stalin at the start of theGreat Purge. He was one of eight Soviet leaders whom the defendants at the first of theMoscow trials, in August 1936, were forced to confess that they plotted to assassinate.^[11] Five of the lists of people to be executed early in the purge were cosigned by him.^[12] At a plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU in December 1936, he delivered a personal attack onNikolai Bukharin, who had been the leading opponent of collectivisation, calling him a liar. At the next plenum, he called for Bukharin andAlexei Rykov to be arrested but voted against executing them.^[13]

In January 1938 he was recalled toMoscow, and replaced byNikita Khrushchev, who was told by Stalin that Kosior "wasn't doing a good job". Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that he objected to the transfer, partly because he liked Kosior, whom he described as "a fairly mild-mannered person, pleasant and intelligent", but Stalin overruled him.^[14] Kosior was appointed head of the Soviet Control Office and deputy prime minister of theUSSR.

Kosior was arrested and stripped of all Party posts on 3 May 1938. During Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the20th Party Congress in 1956, he disclosed that Kosior's case was handled byBoris Rodos, a particularly notorious torturer employed by theNKVD, who was ordered to force a confession out of him.^[15] Under interrogation, Kosior withstood brutal tortures, including being interrogated for 14 hours at a time,^[16] but cracked when his sixteen-year-old daughter Tamara was brought into the room andraped in front of him.^[17] After he had been broken, he was called to Stalin's office, to confrontGrigory Petrovsky, the Chairman of theAll-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee (de jure head of state) and the co-Chairman of theCentral Executive Committee of the Soviet Union, who refused to believe that Kosior was guilty. As Petrovsky described the meeting later:

They sat Kosior in a chair. He sat there depressed; it was obvious he had been through a lot. "Well talk!" "What can I say?" Kosior replied. "You know I'm a Polish spy." ... Then Stalin remarked triumphantly: "There, you see, Petrovsky, and you didn't believe Kosior became a spy. Now do you believe he's an enemy of the people?"^[18]

Kosior was sentenced to death on 26 February 1939 by shooting and shot the same day by GeneralVasili Blokhin.^[19] After Stalin's death, Kosior wasrehabilitated by the Soviet government on 14 March 1956.

Kosior was one of four brothers. The oldest, Vladislav Kosior, and one of his younger brothers, Iosif Kosior, were also active communists. Vladislav was executed during the purges and Joseph died of an illness in 1937. Kosior's wife, Elizaveta, was arrested on 3 March 1938, accused of being the wife of a counter-revolutionary, and shot on 3 August 1938.^[20] Their daughter, Tamara (1922–1938), who was raped in front of her father, committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train.^[19]

Kosior's son, Vladimir Stanislavovich, born in 1922, died in theBattle of Leningrad in the early days of December 1942.^[21]

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