17 Facts About Vlas Chubar

Vlas Chubar's parents were illiterate peasants who owned a small plot of land.

Vlas Chubar was arrested and beaten by gendarmes for belonging to a revolutionary group when he was 13 years old.

Vlas Chubar became a Marxist revolutionary during the 1905 revolution and joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1907.

In 1922, Vlas Chubar was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.

On July 13,1923, Vlas Chubar replaced Christian Rakovsky as Chairman of the Ukrainian Sovnarkom.

The government headed by Vlas Chubar was approved by the Eighth and the Tenth All-Ukrainian congresses of Soviets.

Vlas Chubar supported Stalin in the struggle against Leon Trotsky in the 1920s and made an "ugly speech" attacking Trotsky and others at the Central Committee session in October 1927 which resolved to expel them from the communist party.

Vlas Chubar originally backed Stalin's decision to force peasant farmers to join collective farms.

Vlas Chubar was one of the speakers at a crucial session of the Central Committee in November 1929 who attacked Nikolai Bukharin and others who opposed forced collectivisation.

Vlas Chubar saw the impact of collectivisation for himself when he visited the countryside.

In Pravda, the following day, Vlas Chubar was quoted as having criticised heads of collective farms and other officials who accepted targets they knew could not be fulfilled, saying "it is wrong to accept an order regardless of its practicability" and then to justify the resulting chaos by saying it came from "orders from above".

Vlas Chubar argued "weakly" that the peasants were so poor they had nothing that could be confiscated and sold.

In February 1935 Vlas Chubar was made a full member of the Politburo.

Vlas Chubar briefly served as the Soviet People's Commissar of Finance between August 16,1937, and January 19,1938.

Vlas Chubar supported Stalin loyally in the early stages of the Great Purge.

In 1938 Vlas Chubar was appointed the chief of the Solikamsk construction for the GULAG of Soviet Commissariat of Interior and there he was arrested in June 1938.

In 1956, the head of the communist party, Nikita Khrushchev, told delegates to the 20th Party Congress that Vlas Chubar's case had been handed to the notorious torturer Boris Rodos, who had orders to force a confession out of him.