Mendel Khatayevich
Soviet politician
Died when: 44 years 27 days (528 months)Star Sign: Libra
Mendel Markovich Khatayevich (Russian: Мендель Маркович Хатаевич; 3 October 1893 – 30 October 1937) was a Soviet politician. 17 March 1937 was 2nd Secretary of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine.
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.
Born in Gomel (in present-day Belarus) in 1893, the son of a Jewish merchant, Khatayevich joined the Bolshevik faction Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1913.
Arrested in 1914, he was exiled to Angara.Released from exile by the February Revolution, he returned to Gomel, but in 1918, was transferred to Samara, where he was taken prisoner by anti-Bolshevik troops, and tortured so badly that his right hand was paralysed, but he survived and was rescued when the city was recaptured by the Red Army.
From November 1918, he held a succession of party post in Gomel, Odessa, Moscow, and the Tatar Republic.In 1930, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Khatayevich was running the communist party in the Tatar republic at the beginning of the drive to force the peasants onto collective farms, and in March 1930, when Joseph Stalin had an article published in Pravda, entitled Dizzy with Success, which blamed local officials for the excesses committed during the early months of the new policy, which he had initiated.
In April, Khatayevich wrote an unusually outspoken response, in which he suggested that a large share of the blame lay at the centre.
He claimed: "Instructions should have been given to the central press so that, in criticising the deviations and excesses which took place, they should attack and mock not only local officials.
Many directives on collectivising all livestock, including the smallest types, came from the agricultural commissariat."
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