Petro Shelest

From Justapedia, unleashing the power of collective wisdom
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Petro Shelest
Петро Юхимович Шелест
Petro Shelest.jpg
First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine
In office
23 June 1963 – 19 May 1972
Preceded byNikolai Podgorny
Succeeded byVolodymyr Shcherbytsky
Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union
In office
19 May 1972 – 7 May 1973
PremierAlexei Kosygin
Full member of the 22nd, 23rd, 24th Politburo
In office
16 November 1964 – 27 April 1973
Personal details
Born(1908-02-14)14 February 1908
Andriivtsi, Kharkov Governorate, Russian Empire
(now Ukraine)
Died22 January 1996(1996-01-22) (aged 87)
Moscow Oblast, Russia
Resting placeBaikove Cemetery, Kyiv
NationalitySoviet
Ukrainian
Political partyCommunist Party of the Soviet Union (1928-1973)
Signature

Petro Yukhymovych Shelest[a] (14 February 1908 – 22 January 1996) was a Ukrainian Soviet politician. First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR.

Early career

Petro Shelest was born in a Ukrainian peasant family in a village near Kharkiv in 1908. He studied engineering in Kharkiv, and held industrial jobs between 193 and 1936. In 1928 he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and in 1935 graduated from Mariupol Metallurgical Institute. He served in the Red Army from 1936 to 1937, but transferred to working for the Communist Party in 1937, as thousands of its members were caught up in the Great Purge. Between 1943 and 1954, Shelest was a chief manager of several large factories in Leningrad and Kyiv. From 1954 to 1963, he was respectively Second Secretary of the Kyiv city party committee, Second Secretary of the regional committee, and First Secretary of the Kyiv regional party committee.[1]

First Secretary of Ukraine

After Shelest was appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1963, he set out to run Ukraine with a degree of independence from Moscow, and to develop the republic's economy and encourage Ukrainian culture.[2] It was during his tenure that construction began on the four nuclear plants at Chernobyl.

He antagonised the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, who publicly upbraided Shelest during a visit to Hungary over late delivery of Ukrainian equipment, then remarked: "Look how glum he is - just as if a hedgehog had been rammed down his throat."[3]

In November 1964, when Khrushchev was removed from office, Shelest was promoted to full membership of the Presidium (later renamed the Politburo)

Prague Spring

In 1968, Shelest played a major role in deciding how the Soviet government should respond to the Prague Spring, the sudden loosening of political control in communist Czechoslovakia, which created an atmosphere that spilled over into west Ukraine. He was the only other Politburo member beside Leonid Brezhnev to take part in every meeting between Soviet and Czech communist leaders during that year.[4]

Addressing the Central Committee of the CPSU on 17 July 1968, Shelest accused the Czechoslovak communist party leadership of persecuting communists while making no attempt to control "right-wing opportunists". He claimed:

The Czechoslovak comrades babble on about their wholehearted support for “democratic socialism.” But they disregard the fact that our country, the first country in the world in which socialism triumphed, has already been living and prospering for more than 50 years in accordance with socialist laws.[5]

During negotiations on 30 July 1968, he berated the Czechoslovak delegation, complaining that "Your TV shows, your radio programmes, your newspapers and magazines distributed into our regions closest to your borders make our people ask questions which are full of embarrassment". Shelest went on to insult František Kriegel, a senior Czechoslovak communist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, calling him a "Galician Jew".[4] The Czechoslovak party leader, Alexander Dubček, walked out, and later lodged a complaint about Shelest's comment and tone.

On 3 August, Shelest secretly met the hard-line Czech communist Vasiľ Biľak, who handed him a letter inviting the Soviet government to send in troops to move to restore the dictatorship. This was used as a pretext for the Warsaw Pact invasion on 20 August.

In 1968, Shelest was awarded the "Hero of Socialist Labor" title.

Later career

In May 1972, Shelest was suddenly dismissed and called to Moscow, where for a time he was a deputy chairman of the Sovmin (USSR Council of Ministers), a comparatively junior role for a Politburo member. In April 1973, he was removed from the Politburo and in May was reported to have resigned because of health problems.[6]

Western observers originally assumed that he had been sacked because of his hard line views on foreign policy. Reputedly, he vehemently opposed the visit of U.S. President Richard Nixon, who arrived in Moscow on 22 May 1972. But in April 1973, he was publicly attacked by his successor in Ukraine, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, while an unsigned article in the Ukrainian press denounced a book by Shelest, O Ukraine, Our Soviet Land, published in 1970, as containing 'ideological errors', 'factual errors' and 'editorial blunders' that were likely to encourage Ukrainian nationalism.[7]

Shelest himself blamed his downfall on 'intrigues' by Shcherbytsky and Brezhnev. In his memoirs, he criticized their style of government as "autocratic" and "non-communist".

From 1973 to 1985, Shelest worked as a manager of an aircraft design bureau near Moscow. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was able to revisit Ukraine, after an absence of nearly 20 years. He visited Ukraine several times and delivered lectures about his tenure as leader of Ukraine. He died in Moscow in 1996.

Notes

  1. ^ Ukrainian: Петро Юхимович Шелест
    Russian: Пётр Ефи́мович Ше́лест, romanizedPyotr Yefimovich Shelest

References

  1. ^ "Народився Петро Шелест, партійний і державний діяч, перший секретар ЦК КП України". Національна бібліотека України імені В. І. Вернадського. Retrieved 11 May 2022.
  2. ^ Plokhy, Serhii (2016). The Gates of Europe, A History of Ukraine. London: Penguin. p. 304. ISBN 978-0-141-98061-4.
  3. ^ Tatu, Michel (1969). Power in the Kremlin. London: Collins. p. 420.
  4. ^ a b Veselý, Luboš. "The Ukrainian Factor of the Prague Spring? Petro Shelest and the Czechoslovak Year 1968 in the Light of Documents of the Ukrainian Security Service" (PDF). Retrieved 11 May 2022.
  5. ^ "July 17, 1968 Speech by P. Shelest at the CPSU CC Plenum" (PDF). Wilson Center digital archive. Retrieved 12 May 2022.
  6. ^ "Юрий Яковлевич Фиалков — "Доля правды"". 2 February 2014. Archived from the original on 2 February 2014. Retrieved 6 January 2018.
  7. ^ Tillett, Lowell (December 1975). "Ukrainian Nationalism and the Fall of Shelest". Slavic Review. 34 (4): 752. Retrieved 12 May 2022.

External links

Party political offices
Preceded by 1st Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine
1963–1972
Succeeded by
Preceded by 1st Secretary of the Communist Party of Kyiv Oblast
1957–1962
Succeeded by
Vasyl Drozdenko