Leader
Lazar Kaganovich
Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich · 1893–1991
Photograph, 1935. Wikimedia Commons.
Kaganovich carried Stalin’s decisions into Ukraine, the railways, and the party apparatus. He is one of the most directly documented managers of the grain seizures that produced the Holodomor.
Origin and religion
Born in the village of Kabany, near Kiev, to a Jewish family. Worker-Bolshevik. First secretary in Ukraine during the famine enforcement, and one of Stalin’s closest deputies.
Jewish family from a Ukrainian shtetl background. Atheist. He closed synagogues and churches alike.
Responsibilities
- Stalin’s principal party enforcer in the 1930s
- First secretary in Ukraine during key famine months
- People’s commissar of railways and of heavy industry
He shuttled between Moscow and the grain regions, broke local officials who asked for lower quotas, and helped run the political side of collectivization. The Stalin–Kaganovich letters, published in the Yale Annals of Communism series, are the archive to read.
The record
Stalin set the grain quotas. Kaganovich, with Molotov, Postyshev, and the local secretaries, enforced them in Ukraine and the other grain regions. He survived the Great Terror, was expelled from the party under Khrushchev in 1961, and died in Moscow in 1991.
What they said
No short quotation is filed here. A line that cannot be tied to a book, a decree, or a named archive does not get invented to make the page symmetrical. The record above is the case.
Others filed as Jewish
- Leon Trotsky — Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet (1917)
- Yakov Sverdlov — Chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee
- Grigory Zinoviev — Party boss of Petrograd
Evidence marks such as Opened archive are explained in How to read.