Mendel Khatayevich
Mendel Khatayevich was a Soviet politician.
Born in Gomel in 1893, Khatayevich joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1913. Between 1917 and 1919 he was in various leading Communist Party of the Soviet Union functions in his native Gomel. In 1921 he was transferred to Ukraine. Between 1932 and 1937 Khatayevich was a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Ukraine. In 1933 he became 1st Secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional committee and from 17 March 1937 was 2nd Secretary of the Communist Party 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. On 7 September 1937 he was arrested, and on 27 October 1937 sentenced to death on charges of participating in a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization and executed.
In 1956 Khatayevich was rehabilitated and restored in the party. In a ruling on 13 January 2010 the Court of Appeal for Kiev 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".
