15 Facts About Valery Mezhlauk

Valery Ivanovich Mezhlauk was a government and party official in the Soviet Union during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s.

Valery Mezhlauk is best remembered as the Chairman of the State Planning Committee from 1934 to 1937.

Valery Mezhlauk became a victim of Stalin's Great Purge and was executed on July 29,1938.

Valery Ivanovich Mezhlauk was born February 7,1893, in Kharkov in the Kharkov Governorate of the Russian Empire, one of five sons of an ethnic Latvian nobleman, a teacher, and German mother.

Valery Mezhlauk joined the revolutionary movement and became a member of Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1907.

In 1917, after the Russian Revolution, Mezhlauk became a member of the Kharkov committee of the VKP and of the city's soviet and military revolutionary committee.

Valery Mezhlauk would remain at that post until November 1924 when he was moved to the Presidium of the Supreme Council of National Economy, the Soviet chief economic planning agency.

Valery Mezhlauk remained at VSNKh throughout most of the decade, gaining promotion to vice-chairman of the Council on July 14,1928.

In November 1931, Valery Mezhlauk was appointed the first vice-chairman of the State Planning Agency, an institution which was emerging as central economic planning department in the state.

Valery Mezhlauk became the chairman of Gosplan in April 1934.

Valery Mezhlauk was made vice-chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and a full member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Valery Mezhlauk was the author of many works on the socialist economy and was well known for his expressive caricatures of Soviet officials, including Nikolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky, that he made during official meetings and Party conferences.

Valery Mezhlauk, who was half-Latvian and half-German, was arrested on December 1,1937.

Valery Mezhlauk was sentenced to death on July 28,1938, and executed the next day.

Younger brother, Martin Valery Mezhlauk, was a Commissar of Jurisprudence in Kazan; he was killed by the White Army during the Russian Civil War.