Panas Liubchenko


Panas Petrovych Liubchenko was a Ukrainian revolutionary and Soviet politician who served as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic from 1934 until his 1937 suicide amidst the Great Purge. He was one of the leaders of the Borotbists during the Ukrainian War of Independence.

Early life, political career in independent Ukraine

Panas Petrovych Liubchenko was born on 14 January 1897 in Kaharlyk, then part of the Russian Empire, to a family of peasants. He left school in second grade, later studying at the from 1909. Liubchenko entered politics as an activist for the Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1913. He was a soldier in the Southwestern Front during World War I, being wounded twice. He became a journalist in 1916, writing in the periodicals Socialist Thought and Our Word.
Following the 1917 February Revolution Liubchenko joined the Ukrainian Socialist-Revolutionary Party, also becoming a member of the Central Rada and the Kyiv soviet. During this time he was associated with the internationalist faction of the USRP; the faction later split off to form the Borotbists in March 1919, and Liubchenko was one of their leaders following the split. Liubchenko opposed Pavlo Skoropadskyi, who became leader of Ukraine following the 1918 Ukrainian coup d'état, and was a member of an underground cell of Borotbists in Kyiv. From February to August 1919 he was a member of the Borotbists' Kiev Governorate Executive Committee. Along with all other Borotbists, Liubchenko joined the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1920.

Soviet political career

Throughout the 1920s, Liubchenko served as head of various governorates' executive committees, including the Kiev, Chernigov and Donets governorates. He was president of the All-Ukrainian Association of Agricultural Co-operatives from 1922 to 1925, and became a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1927, dealing with cultural affairs; he later became a full member of the KPU's Politburo in 1934. He became Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR on 28 April of the same year.
Liubchenko, along with Vlas Chubar and Grigory Petrovsky, was among the moderate national communists and supporters of Ukrainianisation who held high positions in Ukraine during the interwar period. Liubchenko, Chubar and Petrovsky represented a middle ground between more active supporters of Ukrainianisation and those who felt minimal pride for Ukraine. Liubchenko represented the All-Ukrainian Council of Trade Unions during the Union for the Freedom of Ukraine trial, acting as a "people's prosecutor".
Liubchenko has been accused by history writer Ihor Bihun of culpability in the Holodomor by intentionally implementing disproportionate quotas for grain production. Along with Kosior and Skrypnyk, Liubchenko publicly confronted Kaganovich and Vyacheslav Molotov at the Third All-Ukrainian Party Conference in 1932 over the quota's size, resulting in the quota being reduced by 1.1 million tonnes.
Liubchenko denounced Skrypnyk in 1933, sending a series of letters to Kaganovich, Molotov and Joseph Stalin accusing him of association with Ukrainian nationalists; Stalin later publicly repeated these claims. During the last years of his life he lived at the Mezhyhirya Residence along with Kosior and Vsevolod Balitsky.

Death

At a 1937 plenum of the Communist Party of Ukraine, Kosior accused the Borotbists of bourgeois nationalism. In particular, Liubchenko was criticised for having led them. Recognising that he would soon be purged, Liubchenko shot his wife and committed suicide during a break in the plenum on 30 August 1937.
Liubchenko was rehabilitated after the death of Joseph Stalin; sources dispute whether the year of his rehabilitation was 1956 or the early 1960s. Petro Shelest, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, was the author of a 1965 petition to posthumously reinstate Liubchenko's party membership.