In 2010, a court in Kyiv refused to posthumously rehabilitate Postyshev, citing his complicity in "genocide" because of his part in causing the Holodomor, mass famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s.

[2] This was a time of upheaval in the countryside across the Soviet Union, as Joseph Stalin forced through a policy of driving the peasants onto collective farms.

In May 1930, Pravda published a signed article by Postyshev castigating party officials in Ukraine who complained that collectivisation was being driven ahead too quickly.

The chairman of the Russian federal government, Sergey Syrtsov, complained in November 1930 that "everything is decided behind the back of the Politburo by a tiny group", which, he said, included Postyshev, while nominally more senior figures such as Kliment Voroshilov and Janis Rudzutaks were excluded.

[5] On 18 September 1932, Postyshev sent a telegram to the Ukrainian party leadership ordering them to meet their quota for exporting grain, in spite of warnings that forced collectivisation was causing mass starvation.

Though nominally junior to the First Secretary, Stanisław Kosior, he "functioned as Stalin's direct emissary, a kind of governor-general of Ukraine".

[7] Postyshev criticized the Ukrainian Communists for their "lack of Bolshevik vigilance" in Stalin's systematic enforcement of increased grain quotas.

His party activists conducted a brutal campaign through farms and homes, searching for suspected hiding places and confiscating every bit of grain, with disregard for the starvation they encountered.

[11] This was the start of a purge of such "nests of nationalist counter-revolutionaries" targeting the commissariats of education, agriculture, and legal workers, not to mention newspapers, journals, encyclopedias and film studios, during which over 15,000 officials were eliminated on charges of "nationalism",[12] and thousands of authors, scholars, philosophers, artists, musicians and editors were exiled to labour camps, executed, or simply disappeared.

As the purges progressed after 1933, affecting millions throughout the Soviet Union, Postyshev's crackdown spread beyond perceived "Ukrainianizers," "nationalists," and opponents of collectivization.

Eventually it came to include the liquidation of entire classes, such as kulaks, priests, people who had been members of anti-Bolshevik armies, and even ethnic Ukrainians who had travelled abroad or immigrated from Galicia.

Defendants at the first of the Moscow Show Trials in August 1936 were made to confess to having planned to assassinate eight leading communists, including Stalin, the late Sergei Kirov, and Postyshev.

During a Central Committee plenum in June 1936, Nikolay Yezhov, whose name would become synonymous with the Great Purge, or 'Yezhovschina', accused him of persecuting innocent Communist Party members in Kyiv, without giving details.

[18] In November, Stalin took up the case of a woman named Nikolayenko, whom Postyshev had expelled from the Kyiv party for making a series of malicious denunciations.

"[19] At the critical plenum of the Central Committee in February 1937, which decided the fate of Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, who had led the opposition to collectivisation, Postyshev continually jeered at them as they tried to defend themselves and voted for both men to be arrested and shot.

[20] But when Nikita Khrushchev delivered his 'Secret Speech' to the 20th Party congress in 1956, he said that during the same plenum, Postyshev protested about the recent arrest of a Ukraine-based Communist official named Karpov, who he said had been wrongly accused of being a Trotskyite.

[21] On 17 March 1937, Postyshev was removed from his post in Ukraine, and appointed First Secretary of the Kuibyshev (Samara) regional party committee, a drastic demotion that was supposedly his chance to "correct his errors".

Postyshev ... changed many of the sentences sent to him for his signature, requiring death where the procurator and investigator thought eight or ten years in confinement were sufficient".

In February 1935, a Communist named M. Garin, whose wife had been expelled from the party at Postolovskaya's instigation, wrote to Stalin complaining that she "is not distinguished either for her intellect or her experience" but exercised "unlimited authority" because she was married to Postyshev.