Liubchenko, Panas Petrovich

Born Jan. 2 (14), 1897; died Aug. 29, 1937. Soviet state and party figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1918. Born in the village of Kagarlyk, Poltava Province, now Kiev Oblast. Son of a peasant.

Liubchenko graduated from a military medical assistants school in Kiev in 1914. He became a member of the left wing of the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party in 1913 and conducted revolutionary propaganda among the soldiers of the army in the field during World War I (1914-18). Liubchenko was a member of the Kiev soviet in 1917 and joined the Borot’ba (Struggle) Party in 1918; in 1920, when this party dissolved, he was admitted to the Ukrainian CP (Bolshevik) with the same standing as in the former party. Member of the Kiev underground revolutionary committee and then of the executive committee of the Kiev soviet in 1918. He served in 1920-22 as deputy chief of the political department of the Second Horse Cavalry Army and as chairman of the Chernigov and then vice-chairman of the Donetsk provincial executive committees.

From 1922 to 1926, Liubchenko was chairman of the board of the agricultural cooperatives of the Ukraine and chairman of the Kiev Provincial Executive Committee. He was secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP(B) and a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian CP(B) from 1927 to 1934. Liubchenko became simultaneously vice-chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR in 1933 and chairman of this body in 1934. He was a delegate to the Fifteenth through Seventeenth Congresses of the ACP (Bolshevik), and he was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee of the ACP(B) at the Seventeenth Congress. Liubchenko was a member of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR and was awarded the Order of Lenin.