a decree “On grain procurements quota”, and arranged for the collective farms to be set a wildly unrealistic target of delivering 356 million pood of grain. This was the second piece of evidence cited by the 2010 court judgement against Chubar. In December, Chubar had another clash with Kaganovich, who complained that fines imposed on peasants who failed to deliver their quota of grain were not being collected. Chubar argued "weakly" that the peasants were so poor they had nothing that could be confiscated and sold. Overruled, he signed an order that penalised three entire regions - Chernihiv, Kyiv and Vinnytsia - that were accused of "maliciously" failing to fulfill their quotas by prohibiting the sale of potatoes, which inevitably caused starvation, which the 2010 court verdict described as "murder by famine" of Ukrainian peasants. Assessing his role in Holodomor, the historian Robert Conquest wrote: "Chubar, who had expressed doubt, or rather certainty that Moscow's policies would lead to disaster, nevertheless enforced them." The Great Purge In 1934 Chubar was transferred to Moscow. Though this was because Stalin no longer trusted him, he was appointed to a senior post as Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of People's Commissars and Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Labor and Defense. In February 1935 Chubar was made a full member of the Politburo. He briefly served as the Soviet People's Commissar of Finance between August 16, 1937 and January 19, 1938. He supported Stalin loyally in the early stages of the Great Purge. During the Central Committee plenum in February 1937 which sanctioned the arrest of Bukharin and other former opponents of collectivisation, Chubar made an inflammatory speech accusing them of "open counter-revolution", and calling Bukharin a "snake", and alleging that Trotsky and his supporters were "agents of fascism". This did not save him. In 1938 Chubar was appointed the chief of the Solikamsk construction for the GULAG of Soviet Commissariat of Interior and there he was arrested in June 1938. In 1956, the head of the communist party, Nikita Khrushchev, told delegates to the 20th Party Congress that Chubar's case had been handed to the notorious torturer Boris Rodos, who had orders to force a confession out of him. The head of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria, also arranged a confrontation in his office with Chubar's former colleague and neighbour, Nikolai Antipov, who had broken under interrogation and had testified against