Yevgenia Bosch

Yevgenia Bogdanovna Bosch (née Meisch; – 5 January 1925) was a Ukrainian Bolshevik revolutionary, politician, and member of the Soviet government in Ukraine during the revolutionary period in the early 20th century.

Yevgenia Bosch is sometimes considered the first modern woman leader of a national government, having been Minister of Interior and the Acting Leader of the provisional Soviet government of Ukraine in 1917. For that reason she is also sometimes considered the first Prime Minister of independent Ukraine.

Early life and family Officially, Bosch was born in Adjigiol village near Ochakiv, in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire, but some records report that she was born in Ochakiv, Kherson Governorate in a family of a German colonist, mechanic, and landowner Gotlieb Meisch, and Bessarabian noblewoman Maria Krusser. Yevgenia Bosch was the fifth and youngest child in the family. Soon after the death of Gotlieb Meisch, Maria Krusser married her husband's brother, Theodore Meisch.

For three years, Yevgenia attended Voznesensk Female Gymnasium, after which, due to a health condition, she worked for her stepfather as a secretary. Being stuck in her parents' household, Yevgenia sought the means to leave. Her older brother Oleksiy acquainted her with his friend Peter Bosch, who was an owner of a local small wagon shop. At 16, Yevgenia married Bosch, and later gave birth to two daughters.

According to another source, Yevgenia Bosch was born in Ukraine to Gottlieb Meisch, an ethnic German immigrant from Luxembourg, and his Moldavian wife. Bosch's parents quarrelled often and her childhood was reportedly an unhappy one. She was educated at the Voznesensk women's gymnasium. At age 17, her parents attempted to arrange a marriage to an older man, but she rebelled and married a bourgeois businessman named Peter Bosch. They had two children.

Afterwards she lived for some time with Pyatakov in Stockholm, Sweden, and in Oslo, Norway (then called Christiania).

After the February Revolution, Bosch and Pyatakov were among the first Bolshevik emigres to return to Petrograd. She moved soon afterwards to Kyiv, where she was elected chairman of the party committee for the Southwestern region. She then returned to what was then the Russian Republic, originally aiming at organizing an opposition to Lenin. After the April conference of the RSDLP, Bosch came to change her position, adhering to Lenin's ideas. Her reconciliation with Lenin cost her her marriage. She was elected chairman of a district (okrug) Party Committee and then of a provincial (oblast) Party Committee in the Southwestern Krai.

Declaration of Soviet Ukraine Bosch was instrumental in launching the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Soviets (December 11–12, 1917, Kharkiv). At this Congress, the Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed to be a Soviet Republic, and its membership in a federation with Soviet Russia was also declared. She was elected to the People's Secretariat of the Bolshevik government of Ukraine.

The Congress also denounced the Central Council of Ukraine, also known as the Central Rada, as well as its laws and instructions. The decrees of the Petrograd Council of People's Commissars extended to Ukraine and an official alliance with the Russian Red Army was declared.

During the period after November 1919 she was under treatment for her tuberculosis and related ailments. She occasionally held secondary positions in the Central Committee of the All-Russian Union of Land and Forest Workers, the People's Commissariat of Education, the Central Union Commission and the People's Commissariat of Food for the provision of aid to the starving, and the People's Commissariat of Workers' and Peasants' Inspection and wrote her memoirs. In 1920–22, she chaired the Military Historical Commission, but from 1922, she was incapacitated by severe illness.

Trotskyism, death and legacy Bosch joined the Left Opposition in 1923.

Her suicide was met with an immediate, deliberate effort by the Soviet government to suppress official acknowledgement of her status as a major Bolshevik leader.

quote|The more rigorous comrades argued that suicide, however justified it might be by incurable illness, remained an act of indiscipline. Besides, in this particular case suicide was a proof of Oppositional leanings. There was no national funeral, only a local one; no urn in the Kremlin wall, only a place befitting her rank in the plot reserved for communists in the Novo-Devichy cemetery. Forty lines of obituary in Pravda.

A number of other important objects in Ukraine and other places in the Soviet Union were given her name, most of which were renamed after 1991 and particularly since 2015, when communist monuments, communist street names and other toponyms have been outlawed in Ukraine under decommunization laws.

Her daughter Olha married Yuriy Kotsyubynsky and gave birth to Oleh Yuriyovych Kotsyubynsky.