Ordzhonikidze, Grigorii

Ordzhonikidze, Grigorii [Орджоникидзе, Григорий; Ordžonikidze, Grigorij; pseudonym Sergo], b 27 October 1886 in Goresha, Georgia, d 18 February 1937 in Moscow. Georgian Bolshevik and Soviet official. In December 1917 he was appointed extraordinary commissar for Ukraine, and during the first Bolshevik offensive in Ukraine he procured grain and coal for Russia and organized Bolshevik resistance against the German forces, including the flooding of the Donbas mines. In 1919 he helped organize Anton Denikin’s defeat in Left-Bank Ukraine, and in 1921–2 he took part in the reconstruction of the Donbas industry. As first secretary of the Communist Party’s Transcaucasian Krai Committee (1921–6) he established Soviet power in Georgia and brutally suppressed any national resistance. As chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Control Commission and commissar of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate he carried out purges of Trotskyists and Ukrainian national communists in the Party. In the spring of 1930 he was sent to Ukraine to speed up collectivization and the anti-kulak campaign. As head of the USSR Supreme Council for the National Economy (1930) and the USSR commissar for heavy industry he directed the industrialization drive, especially the electrification of the Donets Basin and Dnipro Industrial Region of Ukraine. Opposed to the rapid pace of industralization and the mass terror in the 1930s he committed suicide.

K. Hohol

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]