Stalin’s man in the party apparatus
1934: chairing the counting committee at the 17th Party Congress, he deleted roughly 290 votes cast against Stalin, making it appear Stalin — not Kirov, who received only 3 — had the fewest negative votes. Stalin's remark: 'What matters isn't who votes, but who counts the votes.'
Born into a poor Jewish family and trained as a shoemaker, he joined the Bolsheviks in 1911 and became one of Stalin's longest-serving lieutenants, remaining in the inner circle of power for three decades. In the Organization Department and Secretariat he managed appointments and placements, seeding Stalin's loyalists throughout the party machine; in the early 1930s he was de facto second-in-command, directing the reconstruction of Moscow and the building of the Metro. A hard executor of Stalinism (collectivization, the Great Terror, party control in Ukraine), he took part in every defining project of the era. Removed with the Anti-Party Group in 1957, he lived to age 97, dying in 1991 as the system he helped build collapsed around him.
Career Timeline
- 1922–24Organization apparatus: appointments and placements
- 1928–39CC secretary helping Stalin control the party machine
- 1957Removed with the Anti-Party Group
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionCommissar of propaganda department
- 1922.12Formation of the USSRUkrainian party secretary, Moscow's enforcer of UkrainizationAs CP(B)U first secretary (1925-27), he enforced Ukrainization despite being a Russian speaker himself, breaking the party's internal resistance.
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationProcurement plenipotentiaryLeading plenipotentiary commissions sent to the North Caucasus and elsewhere in 1932, he enforced grain procurement and imposed sanctions on resisting villages.
- 1932–1933The Holodomor and the Collectivisation FamineStalin's procurement plenipotentiary; directed the 'grain war' in UkraineDispatched to Ukraine in July and October–December 1932; condemned demands for quota reductions as 'anti-Party.' In November 1932 he directed the mass deportation of entire Kuban Cossack villages to Siberia.
- 1937–1938The Great PurgePolitburo enforcerAs a Politburo leader, he participated in enforcing and approving purge policy.
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarRailways commissarHe ran the wartime railways that carried the industrial evacuation and the supply of the fronts.
- 1953The Fall of BeriaPresidium memberHe joined the Presidium’s move against Beria.
- 1956.02The Twentieth Party Congress and the Secret SpeechAgainst the demotionOne of the leaders who opposed the speech, he was pushed out the next year with the Anti-Party Group.
- 1957The Anti-Party GroupAnti-Party GroupA long-time Stalin organizer, pushed out of the party after defeat.
Ukraine and forced collectivization
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.
The Moscow Metro — an underground palace built by the state
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.
The Execution Lists — signing death warrants by the thousand
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.