Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich

Kaganovich’s political importance cannot be explained simply by calling him Stalin’s personnel manager. From 1925 to 1928, as general secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, he was a senior leader who pressed centralisation and the coercive reorganisation of agriculture on the ground.

Ukraine was then pursuing Ukrainisation, including wider use of the Ukrainian language and the promotion of local cadres, but Kaganovich subordinated these concessions to the campaign against “bourgeois nationalism.” He tightened party control and clashed with Ukrainian communists such as Oleksandr Shumsky, placing demands for national autonomy beneath political unity directed from the centre. The conflict shows how Soviet nationality policy combined cultural accommodation with firm political control.

During the grain-procurement crisis of 1932, Kaganovich headed a special commission in the North Caucasus and promoted placing villages that missed their quotas on “blacklists,” cutting them off from supplies and trade. Arrests and deportations followed. By treating rural resistance as political sabotage rather than as a crisis of subsistence and policy, these measures widened the use of coercion. Kaganovich also participated in the work of Molotov’s commission sent to Ukraine, prioritising state procurement targets and party authority over the relief of peasants’ immediate plight.

Kaganovich should not be reduced to the sole author of the famine, but he was a central politician who implemented and defended state policies that helped produce the catastrophe of 1932–1933. His career condenses the central contradiction of the Stalin era: the achievements claimed for industrialisation and state-building were inseparable from coercion against the peasantry, suspicion toward national movements, and party purges.

Lazar Kaganovich was Stalin's 'Commissar of Railways' and one of the most brutal enforcers of collectivisation. But his most visible legacy is the Moscow Metro.

In 1931, as First Secretary of the Moscow Party Committee, Kaganovich was given full authority over metro construction. Stalin had decreed that the metro should be not mere transport but a monument to socialism. Kaganovich took him literally.

The first line opened in May 1935. Marble columns, bronze chandeliers, stained glass, mosaics: the stations were built like palaces, or cathedrals. Kaganovich visited the construction sites daily and even named a station after himself (renamed 'Okhotny Ryad' after his fall in 1957).

Ironically, while the millions of souls he helped destroy are forgotten, the metro still carries millions of Muscovites every day, one of the most beautiful and most contradictory legacies of the socialist system.

During the Great Terror (1937–1938), Kaganovich was, alongside Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov, a central signatory of the so-called 'Stalin execution lists.' The system worked as follows: the NKVD prepared name lists, Politburo members reviewed and signed them, and the signatures themselves became the death sentence.

In the 11 volumes of lists preserved at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), Kaganovich's signature appears on 189 lists. More than 19,000 people were shot on his authorisation.

At the February–March 1937 Central Committee plenum, Kaganovich incited further terror: 'We have not dug to the bottom, we have not reached the head of the Japanese-German-Trotskyist-wrecker spy ring.' Even in his own Commissariat of Railways, he insisted, there was a 'gang of rabid spies and saboteurs' to be rooted out.

Kaganovich also signed off on NKVD requests for additional 'first-category' (summary execution) quotas. The most notorious example: on 26 April 1938, when Irkutsk party and NKVD officials requested an additional 4,000 first-category executions, Kaganovich and Stalin both marked 'For.'

In old age, Kaganovich reflected: 'We over-salted: we thought there were more enemies than there actually were.' It was neither an apology nor an admission of responsibility. Reducing tens of thousands of deaths to a seasoning mistake, it was a miniature of bureaucratic violence.

The war against Germany began with Kaganovich as People's Commissar of Railways. On 15 October 1941 he received an order to close the Moscow Metro and, within three hours, to prepare proposals for destroying it as a strategically important object; the next morning the metro failed to open for the only day in its history, and by evening the destruction order was cancelled.

His wartime transport role cuts two ways. On 25 March 1942 the State Defence Committee adopted a resolution 'On the NKPS' stating that he 'was unable to cope with the work in wartime conditions' and relieving him of the commissar's post; yet apart from short interruptions of a year to eighteen months he in fact remained at the head of the railways commissariat until 1944, and his credited achievement was keeping rail transport running without interruption so that industrial enterprises and population could be evacuated to the eastern regions. A further documented account has him initially excluded from the State Defence Committee and co-opted only in February 1942, and officially ranked ninth in seniority in 1946.

In 1942 Kaganovich sat on the military councils of the North Caucasus and then the Transcaucasian front and, on Stavka instructions, took part in organising the defence of the Caucasus. On 4 October 1942 the command point of the Black Sea group of forces near Tuapse was bombed; several generals were killed on the spot and he was wounded in the arm by shrapnel. He was a member of the State Defence Committee in 1942–1945 and a deputy chairman of the Council of People's Commissars from 1944.

After the war he returned to economic administration. In 1947 he replaced Khrushchev as first secretary of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, was recalled that December and Khrushchev reinstated; from 1948 to 1952 he chaired Gossnab, the state committee for material-technical supply that allocated producer goods to enterprises. After Stalin's death he briefly regained influence: in March 1953 he became one of the First Deputy Premiers of the USSR Council of Ministers and a full member of the Presidium, on 24 May 1955 he was appointed the first Chairman of Goskomtrud, the state committee on labour and wages; he was removed from that chairmanship on 6 June 1956 and in 1956–1957 was minister of the building materials industry. Among his administrative legacies was work on a new pensions law whose adoption extended pensions to all sections of the population. On 25 November 1955 the Presidium decided, 'on the proposal of comrade L. M. Kaganovich', to give the Moscow Metro the name of Lenin rather than his own, noting his services in the same decree and renaming Okhotny Ryad station after him. At the June 1957 Central Committee plenum he was accused of 'inactivity and crude violations of revolutionary legality' in running the state committees he chaired and was removed from the Presidium with the group now officially called the Anti-Party Group; he was reportedly terrified of arrest and execution, telephoned Khrushchev to plead for clemency, and was given the directorship of a small potash works in the Urals. Expelled from the party in 1961, he lived as a pensioner in Moscow and died in 1991 at 97, buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery. In 1984 the Politburo considered readmitting him to the party alongside Molotov. In his last years he criticised Soviet media attacks on Stalin, and on the repressions he refused to oppose the party's decisions, saying the mistakes were not Stalin's alone but those of the whole Stalinist leadership.

The naming legacy of this phase is documented. From 1935 to 1955 the Moscow Metro itself bore his name; Okhotny Ryad station carried it only in 1955–1957. The first Soviet trolleybus bore the marque 'LK' after his initials, and the children's railway opened in 1937 at Kratovo was his idea. Towns carried his name, including the town of Kaganovich in Moscow oblast (1935–1957) and Kaganovichabad in the Tajik SSR (renamed Kolkozabad in 1957), and his name was removed from almost all objects named in his honour in 1957, though local toponyms such as a settlement within the village of Rogovatoye in Belgorod oblast, and according to one version the village of Lazarevka in Crimea, still bear it.

The post-war antisemitism question is contested in the sources. One Russian-language account presents as a claim found in books such as Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov's 'The Riddle of Stalin's Death' that Kaganovich energetically protested the persecution of Jews and gave Stalin an ultimatum demanding review of the 'doctors' plot', and adds that after Stalin's death he actively supported measures to review that case and end the antisemitic campaign. Britannica instead presents him as conspicuously spared in the post-war campaign of persecution against the Jews, and English Wikipedia describes him as the most prominent Jew in the leadership who 'was lying low, watching the course of events in fear and trembling'. These accounts do not agree and must be attributed separately.

In 1991 Stuart Kahan's 'The Wolf of the Kremlin' claimed that Kaganovich had been interviewed by the author and had admitted partial responsibility for Stalin's death; the remaining members of his family issued a statement disputing all of Kahan's claims. The linked story that Stalin married a sister of Kaganovich is treated as myth by archivally based scholarship, with Svetlana Alliluyeva also denying it.