Petro Shelest
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Petro Shelest (Ukrainian: Петро Шелест) (14 February 1908 - 22 January 1996) was the First Secretary of the Communist party in the Ukrainian SSR, a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet.
Petro Shelest was born in a peasant Ukrainian family in a village near Kharkiv in 1908. In 1928 he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and in 1935 graduated from Mariupol' Metallurgical Institute.
Between 1943 and 1954 Shelest was a chief manager of several large factories in Leningrad and Kiev. Between 1954 and 1962 held top positions in Kiev city administration and in 1962 became secretary of the Ukrainian Communist party. Soon he was promoted to the top position of first secretary of the Communist party of Ukrainian SSR and led it between 1963 and 1972. During his tenure and under his protection, there occurred a brief but very real flowering of Ukrainian national culture. In 1972 he became deputy chairman of Sovmin (Soviet of the Ministers in USSR). Awarded Hero of Socialist Labor honorary title in 1968. In 1973 Petro Shelest was forced into retirement by Leonid Brezhnev who allegedly saw him as too independent. A series of purges of the Ukrainian national intelligentsia followed.
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