58 Facts About Lazar Kaganovich

Lazar Kaganovich was appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1925, and a full member of the Politburo and Stalin's deputy party secretary in 1930.

Lazar Kaganovich was expelled from the party in 1961 and lived out his life as a pensioner in Moscow.

Lazar Kaganovich was born in 1893 to Jewish parents in the village of Kabany, Radomyshl uyezd, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire.

Lazar Kaganovich was the son of Moisei Benovich Kaganovich and Genya Iosifovna Dubinskaya.

Lazar Kaganovich had four elder brothers, all of whom became members of the Bolshevik party.

Several of Lazar Kaganovich's brothers ended up occupying positions of varying significance in the Soviet government.

Mikhail Lazar Kaganovich served as People's Commissar of Defence Industry before being appointed Head of the People's Commissariat of the Aviation Industry of the USSR, while Yuli Lazar Kaganovich became the 3rd First Secretary of the Gorky Regional Committee of the CPSU.

Israel Lazar Kaganovich was made the head of the Main Directorate for Cattle Harvesting of the Ministry of Meat and Dairy Industry.

However, Aron Moiseevich Lazar Kaganovich apparently decided against following his siblings into government, and did not pursue a career in politics.

Lazar Kaganovich left school at 14, to work in shoe factories and cobblers' shops.

Early in his political career, in 1915, Lazar Kaganovich became a Communist organizer at a shoe factory where he worked.

In 1918 Lazar Kaganovich acted as Commissar of the propaganda department of the Red Army.

In June 1922, two months after Stalin became the General Secretary of the Communist Party, Lazar Kaganovich was appointed head of the party's Organisation and Instruction Department, which was expanded a year later by absorbing the Records and Assignment Department, and renamed the Organisation-Assignment Department.

Lazar Kaganovich stated publicly that he would execute absolutely any order from Stalin, which at that time was a novelty.

In May 1924, Lazar Kaganovich became a full member of the Central Committee, after having first been elected as a candidate one year earlier, a member of the Orgburo, and a Secretary of the Central Committee.

From 1925 to 1928, Lazar Kaganovich was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR.

Lazar Kaganovich was particularly suspicious of the poet, Mykola Khvylovy, and sent Stalin a selection of quotations from Khvylovy's verses, which incited Stalin to launch an attack on the poet.

Lazar Kaganovich clashed frequently with the two most prominent ethnic Ukrainian Bolsheviks Vlas Chubar and Alexander Shumsky.

Shumsky obtained an audience with Stalin in 1926 to insist that Lazar Kaganovich be recalled, but Lazar Kaganovich succeeded in getting Shumsky dismissed the following year, over his support for Khvylovy.

In July 1930, Lazar Kaganovich was promoted to full membership of the Politburo, which he retained for 27 years.

In December 1930, when Vyacheslav Molotov promoted to the post of chairman of the Soviet government, Lazar Kaganovich replaced him as Stalin's deputy in the party secretariat, a position he held until February 1935.

Lazar Kaganovich was left in Moscow in charge of party affairs when Stalin was on vacation.

In 1934, at the XVII Congress of the Communist Party, Lazar Kaganovich chaired the Counting Committee.

Lazar Kaganovich falsified voting for positions in the Central Committee, deleting 290 votes opposing the Stalin candidacy.

Lazar Kaganovich's actions resulted in Stalin's being re-elected as the General Secretary instead of Sergey Kirov.

Lazar Kaganovich later headed the Moscow Gorkom of the Communist Party.

Lazar Kaganovich received an order to close the Moscow Metro, and within three hours to prepare proposals for its destruction, as a strategically important object.

In July 1932, Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich travelled to Kharkov, then the capital of Ukraine, to order the Politburo of the Ukrainian Communist party to set a quote of grain procurement of 356 million pood a year.

Lazar Kaganovich traveled to the central regions of the USSR, and Siberia demanding the acceleration of collectivization and repressions against the Kulaks, who were generally blamed for the slow progress of collectivization.

Poltavskaya sabotaged and resisted collectivization period of the Soviet Union more than any other area in the Kuban which was perceived by Lazar Kaganovich to be connected to Ukrainian nationalist and Cossack conspiracy.

Lazar Kaganovich relentlessly pursued the policy of requisition of grain in Poltavskaya and the rest of the Kuban and personally oversaw the purging of local leaders and Cossacks.

Lazar Kaganovich viewed the resistance of Poltavskaya through Ukrainian lens delivering oration in a mixed Ukrainian language.

In spring 1935, Lazar Kaganovich was replaced as the secretary in charge of party organisation, and as chairman of the purge commission, by Nikolai Yezhov, the future head of the NKVD, whose rise was a harbinger of the Great Purge.

Lazar Kaganovich had handpicked Yezhov in 1933 to be deputy head of the purge commission, significantly boosting his career.

In March 1935, Lazar Kaganovich was replaced as first secretary of the Moscow party organisation, by Nikita Khrushchev.

From February 1935 to 1937, Lazar Kaganovich was Narkom for the railways.

Lazar Kaganovich had exterminated so many railwaymen that one official called to warn that one line was entirely unmanned.

Lazar Kaganovich was appointed People's Commissar for Heavy Industry after his predecessor, Sergo Ordzhonikidze committed suicide, in February 1937.

From 1944 to 1947, Lazar Kaganovich was the Minister for Building Materials.

Politically, Lazar Kaganovich was a much diminished figure after the war.

In 1947, after Ukraine had failed to deliver its grain quota in the wake of a drought, Lazar Kaganovich was sent to replace Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Ukrainian CP, while Khrushchev was downgraded to the post of head of government.

However, Lazar Kaganovich was recalled and Khrushchev reinstated in December 1947.

From 1949, until Stalin's death in March 1953, Lazar Kaganovich was in a precarious situation because of the state-sponsored anti-semitism, culminating in the Slansky trial in Prague, and the Doctors' plot, during which hundreds of Jews, including Molotov's wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, were arrested, and many were tortured and shot.

Lazar Kaganovich remained in office throughout, as the most prominent Jew in the Soviet leadership, but was no longer invited to meet Stalin socially, and "was lying low, watching the course of events in fear and trembling".

Lazar Kaganovich was the kind of man who wouldn't say a single word on behalf of his own brother, Mikhail Kaganovich.

On 6 June 1956, Lazar Kaganovich was removed from the chairmanship of the State Committee on Labour and Wages.

Lazar Kaganovich was reportedly terrified that he would be arrested and shot, and phoned Khrushchev to beg for clemency.

Lazar Kaganovich was given the job of director of a small potash works in the Urals.

In 1961, Lazar Kaganovich was expelled from the Party and became a pensioner living in Moscow.

Lazar Kaganovich's grandchildren reported that after his dismissal from the Central Committee, Kaganovich never shouted again and became a devoted grandfather.

Lazar Kaganovich died on July 25,1991, at the age of 97, just before the events that resulted in the end of the USSR.

Lazar Kaganovich is buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

The family denied that Lazar Kaganovich ever had a sister called Rosa, though he had a niece of that name, who was 13 years old in the year when Stalin's second wife committed suicide.

Lazar Kaganovich entered the workforce at the age of 13, an event which would shape his aesthetics and preferences through adulthood.

Lazar Kaganovich was married to Maria Markovna Lazar Kaganovich, a fellow assimilated Kievan Jew who was part of the revolutionary effort since 1909.

Mrs Lazar Kaganovich spent many years as a powerful municipal official, directly ordering the demolition of the Iberian Gate and Chapel and Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

Lazar Kaganovich frequently found it necessary to allow great cruelties to occur to his family to preserve Stalin's trust in him, such as allowing his brother to be coerced into suicide.

Lazar Kaganovich's apartment consisted of two floors, a private access garage, and a designated space for butlers, security, and drivers.