Pavel Petrovich Postyshev was a Soviet politician, state and Communist Party official and party publicist. He was a member of Joseph Stalin's inner circle, before falling victim to the Great Purge. In 2010, a court in Kyiv judged Postyshev guilty of complicity in genocide because of his part in causing the mass starvation in Ukraine in the early 1930s, known as the Holodomor.
Postyshev in 1935
Postyshev speaks at the House of the Unions on 5 September 1931
Lev Mekhlis letter to Zhdanov: "Postyshev searches enemies not where they really are"
The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.
Starved peasants on a street in Kharkiv, 1933, Ukraine's capital at the time
A "Red Train" of carts from the "Wave of Proletarian Revolution" collective farm in the village of Oleksiyivka, Kharkiv oblast in 1932. "Red Trains" took the first harvest of the season's crop to the government depots. During the Holodomor, these brigades were part of the Soviet Government's policy of taking away food from the peasants.
Starvation during the Holodomor, Kharkivshchyna, 1933. Photo by Alexander Wienerberger
Passers-by and the corpse of a starved man on a street in Kharkiv, 1932
