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. Because of poverty, he emigrated to Yuzovka, where he worked at a steel mill. In 1907 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party and quickly became the head of the party's local branch. He was arrested and sacked from his job at the party later that year, and the following year felt obliged to leave the area due to police activity. He used connections to get re-appointed at the Sulin factory in 1909, but was soon arrested again and deported to the Pavlovsk mine. In 1913 he was transferred to Moscow and then to Kiev and Kharkiv, where he organized local Communist cells. In 1915 he was arrested by the Okhrana and exiled to Siberia. After the February Revolution Kosior moved to Petrograd, where he headed the local branch of the Bolsheviks and the Narva municipal committee. After the October Revolution Kosior moved to the German-controlled areas of the Ober-Ost and Ukraine, where he worked for the Bolshevik cause. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, he moved back to Russia, where in 1920 he became Secretary of the CPSU. In 1922 he became head of the Siberian branch of the CPSU. From 1925 to 1928 he was Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU. From 1919, Kosior was for some time a member of Ukraine's Politburo. In 1928 he became General Secretary of the Ukrainian SSR Communist Party. Among his tasks was the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine. In 1930 Kosior was admitted to the Politburo of the CPSU. In 1935 he was awarded the Order of Lenin "for remarkable success in the field of agriculture". In January 1938 he also became head of the Soviet Control Office and deputy prime minister of the USSR. This was the peak of his political success. On 3 May 1938, during the Great Purge, Kosior was stripped of all Party posts and arrested by the NKVD. "Stanislav Kosior withstood brutal tortures but cracked when his sixteen-year-old daughter was brought into the room and raped in front of him." On 26 February 1939 he was sentenced to death by shooting and executed the same day by General Vasili Blokhin. Other Politburo members purged in this period were Jānis Rudzutaks, Robert Eikhe, Vlas Chubar and Pavel Postyshev. After Stalin's death, Kosior was rehabilitated by the Soviet government on 14 March 1956. On 13 January 2010, Kosior was condemned by the Court of Appeals of Ukraine as a political criminal for organizing mass famine in Ukraine in 1932–1933; the court quashed criminal proceedings due to his death.
