A monument to Grigory Petrovsky was destroyed in Dnepropetrovsk. How did the first leader of Soviet Ukraine deserve such an honor?
In Ukraine, the process of renaming geographical toponyms, whose names have communist origin, caused by the package of decommunization laws that came into force on May 21, 2015, is gaining momentum.
In particular, it took the renaming of the center of the Dnieper agglomeration, the fourth most populous city in Ukraine, Dnipropetrovsk. Not everyone now knows that the city received this name in honor of the prominent Soviet party and statesman Grigory Petrovsky. What was the person who actually stood at the origins of Soviet Ukraine? As an answer, we will try to give at least a brief sketch about him.
The opening pages of Petrovsky's biography are quite similar to the biography of many Bolsheviks. He was born on January 23 (February 4), 1878 in the village of Pechengi, Volchansky district, Kharkov province, into the family of a tailor and a laundress. At the age of three, he lost his father. For two and a half years he studied at a school at the Kharkov Theological Seminary, but later he was expelled as not being able to pay for education and throughout his life he acquired the necessary knowledge exclusively through self-education.
At the age of 12, he began to work in the forging workshop of the Kursk-Kharkov-Sevastopol railway, but was dismissed as a minor.
In 1892 he moved to his brother in Yekaterinoslav, where he got a job in telegraph railway workshops. A major plus of the new workplace was the absence of apprenticeship fees. And in the summer of 1893 he managed to get a job in the tool workshop of the bridge shop of the Bryansk plant.
At that time, Yekaterinoslav had already become one of the main industrial centers of Russia, and the situation of workers at enterprises was quite difficult: a complete lack of labor protection combined with low wages. It is not surprising that revolutionary workers' organizations existed in the city since the 1880s. At the Bryansk plant, a social democratic circle appeared in 1894, although at first Petrovsky did not participate in its work.
The situation changed in the spring of 1897 after his acquaintance with Ivan Babushkin, exiled to Yekaterinoslav for revolutionary activity, who created a branch of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class in the city. Petrovsky got involved in revolutionary agitation, issuing various leaflets and proclamations. A year later, he himself organized workers 'circles in the workers' settlements of Kaidaki, Fabrika and Chechelovka.
By May 1, 1899, Petrovsky organized the printing of leaflets by typographic method. The police began collecting information about his activities, but could not arrest him due to the lack of direct evidence. Nevertheless, it became dangerous to stay in Yekaterinoslav, and numerous transfers began. For six months, Petrovsky worked at the Kharkov steam locomotive plant, then in the mechanical workshop of the Black Sea plant in Nikolaev, where in early May 1900 he led a workers' strike, after which he was arrested and expelled from the city.
He returned to Yekaterinoslav, got a job at the Ezau plant and again became involved in revolutionary activities, but soon he was arrested and placed first in the Yekaterinoslav prison, and then in the Poltava prison, where he fell ill with tuberculosis and was released on bail of 100 rubles (money was collected by the workers of the Bryansk plant).
In October 1905, Petrovsky became one of the organizers of the Yekaterinoslav Council. Under his leadership, during the First Russian Revolution, fighting squads were formed in Chechelovka and Kaidaki, but, like in other areas of Russia, the uprising was suppressed.
On October 18, 1912, Petrovsky was elected a deputy of the IV State Duma from the workers' curia at the Yekaterinoslav provincial assembly of electors. In parliament, he advocated the opening of schools with teaching in the Ukrainian language, the admission of the use of the Ukrainian language in administrative institutions and courts on the territory of regions with a predominantly Ukrainian population, freedom of activity of Ukrainian cultural and educational societies.
On April 22, 1914, he, along with other Bolshevik deputies, was expelled from the State Duma. Having finished his parliamentary activity, Grigory Petrovsky again joined in the propaganda of social democratic ideas among the workers, but on November 6, 1914, he was arrested and, like Stalin, exiled to the Turukhansk region, from where in 1916 he was transferred to an eternal settlement in the city of Yeniseisk.
After the February Revolution in July 1917, Petrovsky returned to Yekaterinoslav and in September was elected chairman of the Bolshevik faction of the city Duma. After the October Revolution, he became the second People's Commissar of Internal Affairs of the RSFSR, participated in the negotiations on the conclusion of the Brest Peace. On September 5, 1918, along with others, he signed an ambiguous decree "On the Red Terror".
On November 28, 1918, Petrovsky was elected chairman of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. In this responsible position, he worked until 1938. It was he who, on the part of Ukraine, signed the Treaty on the formation of the USSR, since he completely rejected the idea of the Ukrainian national communists to create an independent Ukrainian Soviet state. During a discussion held in 1923 on the draft Constitution of the USSR, he supported Stalin's project on the entry of independent Soviet republics into the RSFSR as autonomies and opposed the construction of a union state on confederal principles.
In 1932, Petrovsky was appointed responsible for the implementation of grain procurements in the Donetsk region, which later gave the "independent" historians a reason to enroll him in the ranks of the organizers of the Holodomor and the conductors of the "Great Russian imperial ideology."
Grigory Petrovsky escaped the pre-war repressions, but they did not escape his sons. The elder was shot without trial on September 11, 1941, the younger, Leonid, was dismissed from the post of deputy commander of the Moscow Military District in 1938 and was under investigation by the NKVD until August 1940. On November 28, he was reinstated in rank and returned to the Red Army. As the commander of the 63rd Rifle Corps, he died in battle on August 17, 1941. His combat biography is a topic for a separate article.
After being relieved of his post as chairman of the CEC, Petrovsky worked at the Museum of the Revolution. He died on January 9, 1958. Buried in Moscow at the Kremlin wall.
The name of Petrovsky was immortalized many times in Soviet Ukraine. Back in 1926, Yekaterinoslav was renamed Dnepropetrovsk, and in 1959, the settlement of the Shterovsky plant was renamed into Petrovskoe (now it is under the control of the Lugansk People's Republic).
It is curious that after the XX Congress (Petrovsky participated in its work), when it was decided not to name the city in honor of living politicians, Dnepropetrovsk was not renamed. The name of the city on the Dnieper sounded too organic, familiar.
On January 29, 2016, Ukrainian nationalists in Dnepropetrovsk demolished a monument to the first chairman of the All-Ukrainian CEC. The renaming of the city has not yet taken place. History wanted to order the memory of a prominent Ukrainian politician to be destroyed by people speaking the language that Petrovsky defended in schools as a deputy of the IV State Duma.
