Demyan Korotchenko

Demyan Korotchenko was born in to a peasant family in a small village that today is in Sumy Oblast, eastern Ukraine. He joined the Russian Communist Party (b) in 1918 and became active in organising Red Army detachments. He was a minor party official in Ukraine during the 1920s, until 1928, when the boss of the Ukrainian communist party, Lazar Kaganovich, was recalled and put in charge of the Moscow party regional communist party, Korotchenko was also transferred to take a two course, before being made chairman of the local soviet in the Bauman district of Moscow, where Nikita Khrushchev was the district party secretary. In 1935, he succeeded Khrushchev as the district party secretary. He achieved rapid promotion during the Great Purge, becoming First Secretary of the communist party in the Western Oblast, based in Smolensk, after the previous first secretary had been arrested. In 1938, when Khrushchev took over as party boss in Ukraine, Korotchenko was appointed First Secretary of the Dnipropetrovsk regional party committee, and then Chairman of the Ukrainian Council of Ministers. He helped organise partisan resistance when Ukraine was under German occupation in 1941-44. In July 1946, he was appointed a secretary of the party, but reverted to his former post as head of the Ukrainian government in December 1947. From January 1954, he held the largely ceremonial post Chairman of the Ukrainian Supreme Soviet, ie 'President' of Ukraine until his death.

Personality

Khrushchev's biographer, William Taubman, described Korotchenko as a "classic yes-man". Reportedly, "Silence was his trump card. He would wait until (Khrushchev) made some sort of proposal, and then say: "Yes, yes, of course, that's exactly right."^[4]

Awards

• Hero of Socialist Labour (1964)
• Six
  Orders of Lenin
• Order of Suvorov, 1st class
• Order of the Patriotic War, 1st class

Notes

References