Mendel Khatayevich

Mendel Markovich Khatayevich (Russian: Мендель Маркович Хатаевич; 3 October 1893 – 30 October 1937) was a Soviet politician.[1]

Mendel Khatayevich. Official NKVD photo after arrest 1937

Born in Gomel (in present-day Belarus) in 1893, Khatayevich joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1913.[1] Between 1917 and 1919 he was in various leading Communist Party of the Soviet Union functions in his native Gomel.[1] In 1921 he was transferred to Ukraine.[1] Between 1932 and 1937 Khatayevich was a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine.[1] In 1933 he became 1st Secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional committee and from 17 March 1937 was 2nd Secretary of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine.[1] He was one of the main organizers of collectivization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which caused the death by starvation of millions of people.[1] On 7 September 1937 he was arrested,[1] and on 27 October 1937 sentenced to death on charges of participating in a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization and executed.[1]

In 1956 Khatayevich was rehabilitated and restored in the party.[1] In a ruling on 13 January 2010 the Court of Appeal for Kyiv City found Khatayevich and other long-dead Bolshevik leaders Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Pavel Postyshev, Stanislav Kosior and Vlas Chubar guilty of "organizing genocide of the Ukrainian ethnic group".[2][3][4]