Mendel Khatayevych – Organisator of Holodomor
Authors: ROMANETS Natalia 
Published: November 2024

The purpose of the article is to highlight the activities of M. Khataevich as the party leader of the Dnipropetrovsk region during the Holodomor in 1933. The decision to appoint M. Khataevich to the post of first secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) was adopted by the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) on January 24, 1933. The visit of Stalin’s emissary to the Dnipropetrovsk region testifies to the Kremlin’s distrust of the Ukrainian Party-Soviet leadership, which he considered guilty of failure to implement the grain procurement plan of 1932/33. The appointment of M. Khataevich is also explained by the fact that the Dnipropetrovsk region was one of the main producers and suppliers of commercial bread not only in Ukraine, but also in the USSR, and therefore the failure to implement the grain procurement plan by this region affected the ability of the Bolshevik regime to ensure the export of grain to obtain funds for the needs of industrialization. The special status of M. Khataevich as a Kremlin emissary in Ukraine is evidenced by his correspondence with Stalin, which began immediately after his appointment as the first secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks). M. Khataevich, as the head of the party organization of the Dnipropetrovsk region, was well aware of the scale of the famine in the region, receiving information from the party’s district committees, district executive committees, the regional health department, the prosecutor’s office, and the bodies of the GPU of the Ukrainian SSR. However, the mass of reports about the famine clearly irritated the first secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks). He cynically called such messages “swollen” moods that “spread like a contagion” and which must be “cruelly dealt with”. M. Hatayevich tried to convince that cases of “simulation of hunger” are allegedly widespread. Therefore, he demanded from the secretaries of district committees and heads of district executive committees a thorough and immediate verification of “every fact about hunger, swelling, starvation deaths of collective farm workers and sole proprietors”. M. Hatayevich tried to shift the responsibility for the starvation of the peasants to the local leadership: the administrative apparatus of collective farms, village councils, MTS, which were accused of mismanagement and vandalism. Also, the first secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party (of Bolsheviks) was convinced that there was enough bread in the region, which was allegedly stolen by the peasants during the harvest and hid in pits. Therefore, in the conditions of a large-scale famine, M. Hatayevich continued expropriation of peasants’ grain as part of a campaign to create seed funds, which significantly worsened their situation. In addition, instead of providing aid to the starving, in early April 1933, the first secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional committee of the UkrainianCommunist Party (of Bolsheviks) made a proposal to organize the resettlement of 16 245 peasant families from other regions of the country during April-June. All these measures, implemented by M. Hatayevich during 1933, allow him to be recognized as one of the organizers of terror by hunger. Key words: Mendel Hatayevich, Dnipropetrovsk region, Holodomor, peasants, repression, grain, famine.