b. 18 November, 1889, Wegrow, Poland, d. 26 February 1939. Kosior was a Soviet state and party official. He served as first secretary of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine [CP(b)U] during the Famine. Before the Revolution, Kosior was active in the Communist underground in Donetsk. In 1917 he became a member of the Petrograd Military Revolutionary Committee. In 1928, after a stint in Moscow, he returned to Ukraine and was general secretary (1928-34) and then first secretary (1934-38) of the CP(b)U. During his time in power, Ukraine was ravaged by the man-made Famine and by the Postyshev terror. Under his administration, the policy of Ukrainization was reversed and intensive Russification was implemented. Kosior, however, wielded little real power, as it was concentrated in the hands of Pavel Postyshev, Stalin’s emissary in Ukraine. In 1938 Kosior was removed from his posts in Ukraine and transferred to Moscow. In February 1939, at the tail end of the Great Terror, he was shot. He was posthumously rehabilitated in the 1960s.