Piatakov, Georgii or Yurii [П’ятаков, Георгій (Юрій); Pjatakov, Georgij (Jurij)], b 6 August 1890 in Horodyshche (Cherkasy region), Kyiv gubernia, d 30 January 1937 in Moscow. Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet leader. After the February Revolution of 1917 Piatakov headed the Kyiv Bolshevik Committee and represented it in the Central Rada. Although he opposed the Rada’s separatist policies, for tactical purposes he co-operated with it and even sat on the Little Rada (August–November 1917). In September 1917 he became the chairman of the Kyiv Council of Workers’ Deputies, and after the Bolshevik coup he was called to Petrograd to oversee the State Bank. In April 1918, after returning to Ukraine, he became the first chairman of the Organizational Bureau of the newly founded Communist Party (Bolshevik) of Ukraine and the secretary of its Central Committee. To gain Ukrainian support for the Bolsheviks, he promoted, contrary to his principles, CP(B)U autonomy vis-à-vis the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik). When the peasant uprising he had organized failed, Moscow loyalists (the Katerynoslav group) took control of the CP(B)U, and in September 1918 Piatakov was replaced as CC secretary. After the German retreat from Ukraine Piatakov headed the Soviet Provisional Workers' and Peasants' Government of Ukraine (November 1918 to January 1919) and implemented some ultraleft social and economic policies. While he demanded military and political autonomy from Moscow, he waged war against the Directory of the Ukrainian National Republic and an ideological struggle against the Borotbists. In January 1919 he was replaced as head of the government by Vladimir Lenin’s supporter, Khristian Rakovsky.
From 1920 Piatakov supported Leon Trotsky’s positions. As director of the mining industry in the Urals (1920) and the Donbas (1921) he restored order and production by ‘militarizing’ and thenceforth was considered a leading Soviet administrator and economic expert. A key figure in Soviet economic debates of the mid-1920s, Piatakov elaborated a five-year plan for capital accumulation that provided for the accelerated industrialization of Ukraine instead of the Urals.
After the defeat of the Left Opposition in 1927, Piatakov was removed from the USSR Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh) and expelled from the Communist Party. He recanted and in 1929 was readmitted into the Party and appointed chairman of the State Bank in Moscow. As a member of the VSNKh and deputy commissar of heavy industry, he was responsible for much of the industrial success of the Second Five-Year Plan. In the fall of 1936 he was arrested. At the second Moscow show trial of the ‘anti-Soviet Trotskyist center’ in January 1937, Piatakov ‘confessed’ to heading a ‘Ukrainian Trotskyist center’ whose goal was Ukraine’s secession from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He was executed with 12 codefendants immediately after the trial.
Vsevolod Holubnychy, Roman Senkus
[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]