Kotsiubinskii, Iurii Mikhailovich

Born Nov. 25 (Dec. 7), 1896, in Vinnitsa; died Mar. 8, 1937. Soviet statesman and party figure. Son of M. M. Kotsiubinskii. Member of the Communist Party from 1913.

In 1914, Kotsiubinskii became a member of the Chernigov Committee of the RSDLP. During World War I (1914–18) he was drafted (1916) into the army; he graduated from the Odessa Military School with the rank of ensign. He served in Petrograd, conducting revolutionary agitation among soldiers. He was a participant in the February Revolution of 1917 and a member of the Bolsheviks’ Military Organization. He was repeatedly arrested by the Provisional Government for antiwar propaganda. On Oct. 20 (Nov. 2), 1917, he became a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee and a commissar of the Semenovskii Guards Regiment. He took part in the storming of the Winter Palace on Oct. 25 (Nov. 7), 1917, and attended the First and Second Congresses of the soviets. He was commandant of the Moscow-Narva Region. He headed a combined Red Guard detachment in fighting against the troops of Kerensky and Krasnov.

At the First Congress of the soviets of the Ukraine (December 1917) he was elected to the first Soviet government as deputy people’s secretary on military affairs. In January 1918 he became commander in chief of Soviet troops in the Ukraine; he directed the operation in routing the nationalist troops and liberating Kiev from the Central Rada; he was a member of the All-Ukrainian Military Revolutionary Committee. After German troops occupied the Ukraine, he was a member of the rebel Ukrainian government and a regional party committee. In 1919 he was a member of the Military Revolutionary Council of the Ukrainian Front; he was chairman of the Chernigov provincial committee of the Communist Party of the Ukraine (Bolshevik). In 1920 he was a member of the Poltava provincial committee of the CPU(B).

In 1921–22, Kotsiubinskii was the Ukraine’s diplomatic representative in Vienna. In 1925 he became an adviser for the Embassy of the USSR in Austria and later in Poland. From 1930 he was deputy people’s commissar for farming of the Ukrainian SSR and vice-chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars at the same time as he was chairman of the Ukrainian SSR State Planning Committee. He was repeatedly elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPU(B) and a member of the Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPU(B).