Hryhoriy Hrynko

Hryhoriy Hrynko

Hryhoriy Fedorovych Hrynko (November 18, 1890, N.S. November 30), Shtepivka; - March 15, 1938; Ukrainian: Григорій Федорович Гринько, Hryn’ko; Russian: Григорий Фёдорович Гринько, Grigoriy Fyodorovich Grinko) was a Soviet Ukrainian statesman who held high office in the government of the Soviet Union.

Hrynko was a leader of the Ukrainian Borotbists, and joined to the Communist Party (bolshevik) of Ukraine when the Borotbists were dissolved by the Comintern.^[1] As former member of the defunct pro-independence party he was purged in 1922 for "nationalist deviation", but regained favour during the effort for Ukrainization and made Ukrainian Commissar of State Planning in 1925.^[2]

He later served as finance minister of the Soviet Union in Moscow, from 1930 to 1937, replacing Nikolai Bryukhanov.

He was executed during the Great Purge in March 1938. He was allegedly forced to publicly confess to his "nefarious" activities during the period of Ukrainization at Trial of the Twenty One with Christian Rakovsky and nineteen other members of the so-called Right Opposition. These were former Soviet leaders, actual or presumed political enemies of Joseph Stalin, who were charged with opposing the policies of rapid industrialization, forced collectivization, and central planning, as well as international espionage, attempted overthrow of the Soviet Union, and planning to eliminate the Soviet leadership.

The Russians were so pleased with Hrynko's outline of the so-called dangers of Ukrainian nationalism to the Soviet Union that his testimony was translated and published in English.^[3] He was sentenced to death and shot.

Notes

1. Magocsi (1996), p 532.
2. Magocsi (1996), p 538.
3. Magocsi (1996), p 568–9.

References

• Magocsi, Paul Robert (1996). A History of Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-0830-5.
• Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites’ Heard before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR, Moscow, March 2–13, 1938: Verbatim Report (Moscow 1938), pp 67–71, 718–721. Cited in Magocsi (1996), p 568–70.