KAGANOVICH, LAZAR MOYSEYEVICH

(1893–1991), Stalinist; deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1957.

Known for his viciousness, Lazar Kaganovich was a staunch Stalinist and a ruthless participant in the purges of the 1930s. Born near Kiev, Ukraine, Kaganovich became active in the Social Democratic Party from 1911 and served as the first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party from 1925 to 1928. A brilliant administrator, Kaganovich served on the Presidium of the CPSU from 1930 to 1957 and held numerous important posts, including first secretary in the Moscow Party Organization (1930–1935), key administrator of the Agricultural Department of the Central Committee (1933), people's commissar of transport (1935), and people's commissar of heavy industry (1935). In December 1944 he was appointed deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union.

An influential proponent of forced collectivization, Kaganovich advocated harsh repression of the rich peasants, or kulaks, in the late 1920s. During the grain procurement campaign of 1932, Kaganovich headed a commission that was sent to the North Caucasus to speed up grain collection. On November 2 his commission adopted a resolution that called for the violent breakup of kulak sabotage networks and the use of terror to break the resistance of rural communists. The result was the arrest of thousands and the deportation of tens of thousands of rural inhabitants.

His belief in the efficacy of coercion led him to develop a strategy that called for indiscriminate mass repression of workers as a way to increase productivity and punish what he considered anti-Soviet actions in industry. As commissar of transport, Kaganovich was particularly hard on railway men, calling for the death sentence for various offenses that might lead to the breakdown of Soviet transport plans. He devised the so-called theory of counterrevolutionary limit setting on output that he used to destroy hundreds of engineering and technical cadres.

In the Great Purges (1936–1938) Kaganovich took the extreme position that the Party's interests justified everything. In the summer of 1937 Kaganovich was sent to carry out purges of local Party organizations in Chelyabinsk, Yaroslavl, Ivanovo, and Smolensk. Throughout 1936 and 1937 he also had all his deputies, nearly all road chiefs and political section chiefs, and many other officials in transport arrested without any grounds whatsoever. In August 1937 he demanded that the NKVD (secret police) arrest ten officials in the People's Commissariat of Transport because he thought their behavior suspicious. All were arrested as spies and shot. He ultimately had thirty-eight transport executives and thousands of Party members arrested.

Following Stalin's death in 1953, Kaganovich opposed Nikita Khrushchev's proposal to admit errors committed by the Party under Stalin's leadership. He remained an oppositionist, eventually allying with Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov, and Dmitry Shepilov, in the so-called Anti-Party Group that attempted to remove Khrushchev from power in 1957. Following the failed coup, Kaganovich was removed from his position as deputy prime minister and assigned to managing a potash works in Perm oblast. He died there of natural causes in 1991.

See also: collectivization of agriculture; kulaks; purges, the great; stalin, josef vissarionovich

bibliography

Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press.

Courtois, Stephane, et al. (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Crankshaw, Edward. (1970). Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little, Brown.

Kahn, Stuart. (1987). The Wolf of the Kremlin. New York: Morrow.

Kate Transchel