Lazar Kaganovich (22 November 1893-25 July 1991) was a Soviet politician and administrator who was infamous for being one of Joseph Stalin's closest allies and the mastermind of the Holodomor in Ukraine.
Biography[]
Lazar Kaganovich was born in Kabany, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire in 1893 to a poor Jewish family, and he joined the Bolsheviks in 1911. He fought in World War I, and after the Russian Revolution in October 1917 helped to spread Bolshevism in Belarus. He went to Petrograd as a member of the Constituent Assembly, and he was a political commissar of the Red Army during the Russian Civil War. His subsequent career was largely based on his participation in, and use of, Joseph Stalin's terror and the Great Purge. In 1925, he became head of the Communist Party of Ukraine, and in 1928 became a Secretary of the CPSU's Central Committee. As head of the agricultural section of the party from 1929 to 1934, he ruthlessly carried out Stalin's collectivization policies. He was also First Secretary of the Moscow Party Committee (Mayor of Moscow) from 1930 to 1935. He became responsible for transport in 1935, heavy industry in 1937, the fuel industry in 1939, and the oil industry in 1940. He used the general uncertainties of the Great Purge, in which he allowed the execution even of his brother, to push through his targets mercilessly, eliminating all who stood in his way. During World War II, he extended the terror to the military, when he was responsible for the army's prosecution system. He returned as Chairman of the Ukrainian Party in 1947, though by this time he was already eclipsed by his erstwhile underling, Nikita Khrushchev. The latter outmaneuvered him after Stalin's death, and compromised him greatly with his anti-Stalinist campaigns of 1956. He joined Vyacheslav Molotov and Georgy Malenkov in the "anti-party group" which attempted to oust Khrushchev. When this failed, he was made a manager at a cement factory in Sverdlovsk. At his death in 1991, he was the last surviving "Old Bolshevik", and the Soviet Union outlived him by a mere five months.
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