Mendel Khatayevich

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.

When the Court of Appeal for Kyiv City investigated the famine that swept through Ukraine in the 1930s, in a judgement delivered on 13 January 2010, they found Khatayevich and other long-dead Soviet leaders Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Pavel Postyshev, Stanislav Kosior and Vlas Chubar guilty of "organizing genocide of the Ukrainian ethnic group".

"[4] But on 23 October 1932, he sent a directive to every regional, city and district committee of the Ukraine Communist Party ordering them to take firm measures to confiscate grain from peasants.

[citation needed] In November, he and Chubar co-signed a decree on "crushing kulak groups", which led to the army being deployed to break the resistance of the peasants.

In March 1933, he wrote to Stalin, again, warning "I am literally inundated with daily reports and materials about cases of starvation, swelling and disease from hunger.

He was, on the other hand, one of the beneficiaries of the Great Purge in its early stage, when he was promoted to the post of Second Secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR in March 1937, when Postyshev was sacked.

However, on 15 July 1937, a man named Kulyakin, who was visiting Moscow from Dnepropetrovsk, wrote a letter to the Central Committee, wanting to know why Khatayevich was still in office when more two dozen officials linked to him had been arrested.