Mendel Khatayevich

Mendel Markovich Khatayevich (; 3 October 1893 – 30 October 1937) was a Soviet politician. was Second Secretary of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine. These measures provoked civil war in the region, with the Red Army having to be deployed to round up peasants, and party members having to be armed. This caused alarm in Moscow. On 31 January, Joseph Stalin, sent Khateyevich a telegram warning that "Your haste on the kulak issue has nothing to do with party policy, What you're dealing with is naked dispossession of the kulaks in the worst form." 1

Role in the Holodomor In October 1932, Khatayevich was transferred to Ukraine, as a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, and Secretary of the Ukraine Communist Party Central Committee.

It is well documented that Khatayevich knew that the harvest of 1932 was dismal, and was threatening starvation for the rural population. Nine days after his arrival, he wrote to Stalin to warn that Ukraine was not going to meet its target for delivering grain, and might produce only half of what was expected, citing as one of the main reasons "the decreased well-being of collective farmers (and) lack of proper production activity on collective farms." But on 23 October 1932, he sent a directive to every regional, city and district committee of the Ukraine Communist Party ordering them to take firm measures to confiscate grain from peasants. In November, he and Chubar co-signed a decree on "crushing kulak groups", which led to the army being deployed to break the resistance of the peasants.

Early in 1933, Khatayevich was moved to Dnipropetrovsk, as First Secretary of the regional communist party. In March 1933, he wrote to Stalin, again, warning "I am literally inundated with daily reports and materials about cases of starvation, swelling and disease from hunger. In recent days, there have been more and more reports of corpse-eating and cannibalism." This included corpses lying on the streets of several towns. He went on to claim that many of these reports of death and illness were "exaggerated", but pleaded all the same for emergency medical care. In June, he sent a telegram begging for food to be sent the region.

There was no hint of these problems in the speech Khatayevich delivered to the 17th Party Congress in 1934, when he praised the "fighting spirit" of Ukraine's collective farmers, and the way that "Comrade Stalin led our party, led us, our entire army of fighters for socialism, with the greatest firmness, calmness, composure, with a clear perspective."

Arrest and death In 1935, at the regional party plenum, Khatayevich spoke out against wholesale purges, and in August 1936, he stated there that “there are elements of authoritarianism in the practice of our leadership”. He was, on the other hand, one of the beneficiaries of the Great Purge in its early stage, when he was promoted to the post of Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR in March 1937, when Postyshev was sacked.

However, on 15 July 1937, a man named Kulyakin, who was visiting Moscow from Dnepropetrovsk, wrote a letter to the Central Committee, wanting to know why Khatayevich was still in office when more two dozen officials linked to him had been arrested. The letter was passed to Stalin, who had it sent on to the head of the Dnepropetovsk party committee, Natan Margolis, ordering him to check it out. Khatayevich was arrested on 7 September 1937, and on 27 October 1937 sentenced to death on charges of participating in a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization and executed.

In 1956 Khatayevich was rehabilitated and his membership in the Party restored.