Stanisław Kosior was born in 1889 in Węgrów in the Siedlce Governorate of the Russian Empire, in the region of Podlachia, to a Polish family of humble factory workers.

After the February Revolution Kosior moved to Petrograd, where he headed the local branch of the Bolsheviks and the Narva municipal committee.

Speaking to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in November 1929, he argued that collectivisation was the only way to make progress in agriculture.

After the harvest in 1931, Kosior knew that collectivisation was causing a catastrophic fall in agricultural output in Ukraine – visiting Moscow in August, he warned Stalin's deputy, Lazar Kaganovich, that there would be a shortfall of 170 million poods (nearly three million tons) of grain, but Kaganovich blamed the problem on mass theft by Ukrainian peasants and forced Kosior to follow this opinion.

"Not only did they not fight; not only did they fail to organise the collective farm masses in the struggle for bread against the class enemy, they often followed along with this peasant mood", he said.

The fact that he imposed this measure, "in spite of starvation in Ukrainian villages", was the first several examples cited by the Kyiv Court of Appeal in its 2010 resolution that judged Kosior to have been complicit in genocide.

When Kosior submitted a formal request for relief to the Politburo in Moscow, in June, it was turned down flat, and Kaganovich warned him his "mistakes" would be held as an example to other regional party leaders of how not to do their job.

[12] At a plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU in December 1936, he delivered a personal attack on Nikolai Bukharin, who had been the leading opponent of collectivisation, calling him a liar.

[13] In January 1938 he was recalled to Moscow, and replaced by Nikita Khrushchev, who was told by Stalin that Kosior "wasn't doing a good job".

Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that he objected to the transfer, partly because he liked Kosior, whom he described as "a fairly mild-mannered person, pleasant and intelligent", but Stalin overruled him.

During Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress in 1956, he disclosed that Kosior's case was handled by Boris Rodos, a particularly notorious torturer employed by the NKVD, who was ordered to force a confession out of him.

[19] Kosior's son, Vladimir Stanislavovich, born in 1922, died in the Battle of Leningrad in the early days of December 1942.