Lasar Moissejewitsch Kaganowitsch

LM Kaganovich (1935)

Lazar Kaganovich , actually Lasar Mossjewitsch Kogan ( Russian Лазарь Моисеевич Каганович * 10 ^{. Jul} / 22. November  1893 ^greg. In Kabany , Ujesd Radomyshl , Kiev Governorate , Russian Empire (now the abandoned village Dibrova Rayon Poliske in the Oblast Kiev , Ukraine ); † July 25, 1991 in Moscow ) was a Soviet politician and one of the closest confidante of Joseph Stalin .

biography

Ascent

Lasar Kaganowitsch, son of Jewish parents, learned the trade of a shoemaker and then worked in a shoe factory. In 1911 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDLP). He carried out propaganda party work among the workers of Jewish origin in northern Ukraine and in Belarus . Arrested during the First World War , he managed to escape via Kiev into the Donets Basin . There he worked as an illegal Bolshevik in Yusovka and met the young Nikita Khrushchev .

After the February Revolution of 1917 he was drafted into the army and sent to Saratov . He was a member of the local Bolshevik organization. He escaped arrest by fleeing to Gomel . With the outbreak of the October Revolution in Petrograd , Kaganowitsch took an active part in the takeover of power in Gomel as political commissar . He was a member of the Bolshevik faction of the Constituent Assembly (dissolved in January 1918) and a delegate to the 3rd All-Russian Congress .

In June 1918 he became a member of the Red Army's propaganda department , first in Nizhny Novgorod and then in Voronezh . In the civil war he dodged north and headed a local military revolutionary committee. After the failure of the offensive by the white troops in the autumn of 1919, he took over the management of the Voronezh governorate for a short time . In the summer of 1920 Kaganovich became chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (head of government) of Turkestan and a member of the RKP (b) office for Turkestan, People's Commissar of the Workers 'and Peasants' Inspection and Chairman of the Tashkent City Council .

During this time he got to know Josef Stalin, who promoted his steep rise in the party. As General Secretary of the party, Stalin summoned Kaganovich to Moscow. From 1922 to 1923 he was the head of the organization department of the Secretariat of the Central Committee (ZK) . In his first publications he dealt with theoretical questions about ideology. From June 2, 1924 to April 30, 1925 he was secretary of the Central Committee for the first time .

Shortly afterwards, Stalin used him in the beginning power struggle against Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenew in the province; from 1925 to 1928 he was general secretary of the Ukrainian party organization. At the " XIV. Industrialization Party Congress " in 1925, he unreservedly supported Stalin's political course.

Kaganowitsch pursued a policy of “Ukrainization”, in which the Ukrainian language, Ukrainian culture (opera, theater) and local cadres in the administrative and party apparatus were promoted. The struggle against all “petty-bourgeois nationalists” and advocates of greater autonomy, however, intensified. In all conflicts between the Ukrainian leadership and Moscow, however, he was always on Moscow's side. Kaganovich's policies in Ukraine provoked conflicts with the local party and the local government. Therefore Vlas Chubar and Petrovsky demanded his recall. Stalin brought him back to Moscow. From July 12, 1928 to March 10, 1939 he was secretary of the Central Committee for the second time.

At the center of power

From July 23, 1926 to July 13, 1930, Kaganowitsch was a candidate for the Politburo of the CPSU. In 1930 - at the age of 37 - he was promoted to the highest political body in the USSR: from July 13, 1930 to June 29, 1957, he was a full member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( CPSU ). Until Stalin's death in 1953, he was one of the most powerful party leaders under Stalin along with Zhdanov , Molotov , Voroshilov , Mikoyan , Malenkov and Beria .

Kaganowitsch supported the disempowerment of Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov . He was one of the strongest advocates for the abolition of the New Economic Policy . He welcomed the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture and played a major role in the fight against the so-called kulak class in the countryside. As a close collaborator of Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov were one of the most powerful political leaders in the country in the first half of the 1930s. He constantly interfered in all possible areas of life and led or organized various measures and government campaigns.

He took a dogmatic position when discussing scientific Marxism . Therefore he attacked on the XVI. At the 1930 party congress the Russian scientist Lossew as a "reactionary" and "enemy of Soviet power". As People's Commissar of the Workers 'and Peasants' Inspection, he enforced the party views and named the cadres in the relevant party newspapers. He fought the " formal bureaucratic poking around " in the party documents and the " lazy liberalism " against party opponents and deviants from the line of Marxism and Leninism, as opponents of Trotskyism and the views of Nikolai Bukharin .

With Molotov he took part in the all-Ukrainian party conference in 1930 and supported the collectivization policy which, according to many historians, led to the catastrophic famine from 1932 to 1933, the Holodomor in Ukraine. In the summer of 1932, Kaganowitsch traveled to the North Caucasus as head of a large government delegation, where he fought against the alleged “sabotage” in the supply of wheat and rye to the state. The population of entire Cossack villages was deported to Siberia and thousands of people were arrested. In mid-December 1932 he intensified terrorism in Ukraine. During this time, several million people died from famine.

As secretary of the Central Committee, he was the organizer of the “XVII. Winner's Party Congress ”from January 1934. From 1930 to 1935 he also headed the Party Control Commission and the Moscow Party Organization. As the first secretary of the Moscow party organization, Kaganowitsch was responsible for redesigning the city's appearance. Its activity began with the "exposure" of alleged "counterrevolutionary conspiracies" within the administrative and economic departments of the capital. Kaganowitsch wanted to push through an "ideal city of the future", and he was therefore one of the main people responsible for the destruction of many old city areas, churches and buildings in Moscow and so on. a. also responsible for the demolition of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 1931. (Reconstruction from 1992).

During his time as Transport Minister of the USSR and as the political head of Moscow, the Moscow Metro was built as "construction site No. 1" in the style of socialist classicism from 1931 to relieve the overcrowded Moscow streets. Aggressive mass propaganda as well as paramilitary harshness and discipline allowed the inauguration of the first 11 km long subway line in 1935. The Moscow metro bore his name from 1935 to 1955.

In the party, Kaganowitsch was seen as the “fireman” or the “locomotive” of the Politburo , who solved mishaps and difficult situations with relentless severity.

Member of the Soviet government

From 1935 to 1937 Kaganowitsch was People's Commissar (i.e. Minister) for the Railways in the Molotov government. He remained the Central Committee Secretary until 1939 and a member of the Politburo until 1957, but not the Moscow Party Secretary and head of the Party Control Commission. Pictures of him soon adorned all train stations. He tried, with limited success, to improve and rehabilitate the railroad system, which was ailing at the time, through discipline, clean-up campaigns and rigor as well as technical expansion. Railway employees were allowed to own small pieces of land on which they could keep small livestock.

From 1937 to 1939 he was People's Commissar for Heavy Industry. From 1938 to 1942 and from 1943 to 1944 he was again People's Commissar for Railways and Transport. At the same time he headed the People's Commissariat for Fuels from 1939 and the People's Commissariat for the Oil Industry from 1939 to 1940. 1945 to 1947 he was Minister for Building Materials.
From 1938 to 1945 he was also Deputy Chairman and from 1954 to 1957 First Deputy Chairman of the Government of the USSR in the cabinets of Molotov, Stalin, Georgi Malenkov and Nikolai Bulganin . As Deputy Prime Minister he was responsible for the control of the ministries for the complex of heavy industry, transport and reconstruction from 1947.

Stalin Purges

Kaganowitsch was jointly responsible for the Stalinist purges from 1937 to 1939. He later justified his participation in the Great Terror with the statement: “We have sinned by going too far and certainly made all the mistakes ... but we won the Second World War to have."

He was involved in the persecution of the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold .

World War II and post-war period

Kaganovich was one of those responsible for the Katyn massacre . Although his signature is missing on the murder order from the Politburo in Moscow, his name with the addition “for” (Russian: за ) was added by hand (see Document 1). As People's Commissar, he was responsible for transporting captured Poles to their execution sites.

• Lavrenti Beria proposed to Stalin to execute Polish officers with the consent of Lasar Kaganowitsch in March 1940
• 

  Page 1.

• 

  Page 2.

• 

  Page 3.

• 

  Page 4.

From February 1942 to 1945, as a member of the State Defense Committee (War Cabinet), he was responsible for all war transports and relocating and relocating industrial complexes. For a short time he was replaced as People's Commissar for the railways and transport. In the meantime he was briefly a member of the Military Council of the North Caucasus Front in 1942 .

From 1946 to 1947 he succeeded Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Ukrainian Party Organization in order to take over the rebuilding after a drought. There he worked with Patolichev (1952-1953 Politburo candidate).

He promoted Leonid Brezhnev , whom he made party secretary of the Zaporizhia region and Vladimir Semitschastny , the general secretary of the Ukrainian Komsomol , after Kaganovich had ousted almost the entire leadership of this organization. Stalin urged Kaganovich to work with Khrushchev and called him back to Moscow a few months later.

Kaganovich was the only remaining Jew in the top Soviet leadership towards the end of Stalin's rule, but did nothing to stop the anti-Semitic campaign that began in late 1948 . His influence in the political leadership diminished. He was also no longer invited to the "sociable evenings" at Stalin's dacha and hardly performed any important public functions.

Loss of power

After Stalin's death (1953) and the XX. At the CPSU party congress in 1956, Khrushchev succeeded in 1957 in disempowering the “Stalinists” ( Malenkov , Molotov, Kaganowitsch, Pervukhin , Saburov , Bulganin and Voroshilov ) who were replacing him as members of an “anti-party group”. Kaganowitsch was briefly director of an asbestos production plant in the city of Asbestos and in 1958 was responsible for housing construction in Kalinin . After the XXII. Party congress of 1961 were u. a. Kaganowitsch, Molotov and Malenkow expelled from the party. However, his political departure shows that things had changed in the Khrushchev era. While elected and expelled members of the Politburo were usually arrested and shot during Stalin's lifetime, Kaganowitsch lived as a pensioner in Moscow until the end of his life. He insisted all his life that Stalin's and his politics were the right way and defended his way in his memoirs.

Others

family

• His brother Mikhail Kaganovich was a high party functionary, member of the Central Committee (since 1934) and the organizational office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (1934-1939) and from October 15, 1937 to January 11, 1939 People's Commissar for Defense Industry. In 1941 he was reprimanded and warned by the party; he then committed suicide.
• His sister or niece Rosa Moissejewna Kaganowitsch was considered Rosa Stalina by some researchers as Stalin's third wife. There is no confirmation of this in recent research.

Honors

• Hero of socialist labor
• Order of Lenin , four times
• Order of the Red Banner of Labor

literature

• Leon Trotsky: Stalin - A biography ; Cologne, Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1952; Herrsching: Pawlak, [1982?]; ISBN 3-88199-074-7 ; Essen: Arbeiterpresse-Verlag, 2001; ISBN 3-88634-078-3
• Stuart Kahan: The Wolf of the Kremlin . New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987.
• Simon Sebag-Montefiore : Stalin. At the court of the red tsar ; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2006; ISBN 978-3-596-17251-1
• Roj Medvedev. Okruschenie Stalina. Moscow, 2006.
• Edward A. Rees: Iron Lazar - a political biography of Lazar Kaganovich. London: Anthem Press, 2012, ISBN 978-1-84331-360-1 .

Web links

Commons : Lasar Kaganowitsch  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Lasar Moissejewitsch Kaganowitsch in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Lasar Moissejewitsch Kaganowitsch in the press kit 20th Century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• “Fascism would not have waited” - From an interview with Lasar Kaganowitsch. In: “Beilage” (collected contributions from the discussion of the left), December 21, 1990, p. 7.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Katyn 1940-2000. Documenty. Sost .: NS Lebedewa. Moscow 2001, p. 24.