Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich (Kogan), of Jewish descent, was born in Kubany, near Kiev, Ukraine, in 1893. In 1911 he joined the Jewish-founded Communist Party and became involved with the Bolsheviks (Lower East Side New York Jews). Kaganovich took an active part in the 1917 takeover of Christian Russia by Communism and rose rapidly in the Party hierarchy.
From 1925 to 1928, he was first secretary of the party organization in Ukraine and by 1930 was a full member of the Politburo.
Kaganovich was one of a small group of Stalin's top sadists pushing for very high rates of collectivization after 1929. He became Stalin's butcher of Christian Russians during the late 1920s and early 1930s when the Kremlin launched its war against the kulaks (small landowners who were Christians) and implemented a ruthless policy of land collectivization. The resulting state-organized forced famine, was a planned genocide and killed 7,000,000 Ukrainians between 1932 and 1933, and inflicted enormous suffering on the Soviet Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan.
Josef Stalin (Dzhugashvili) altered census figures to hide the millions of famine deaths when the Ukraine and northern Caucasus region had an extremely poor harvest in 1932, just as Stalin was demanding heavy requisitions of grain to sell abroad to finance his industrialization program which was on top of enforced collective farming of 1929. Stalin is conservatively estimated to have been responsible for the murder and/or starvation of 40,000,000 Russians and Ukrainians during his reign of terror, while the total deaths resulting from the de-kulaklization and famine, by way of Kaganovich, can be conservatively estimated at about 14,500,000.
On any analysis, Kaganovich, was one of the worst mass murderers in history, and little wonder that during World War II large numbers of Ukrainians greeted the Germans as liberators, with many joining the Waffen-SS to keep Communism from enslaving all of Europe.
Lazar Moyseyevich Kaganovich, one of Stalin's closest aides and the last surviving Bolshevik leader who joined the Communist Party before the Revolution, died here on Thursday. He was 97 years old.
Once a towering figure in Kremlin politics, Kaganovich sometimes was regarded as the No. 2 man in the Soviet Union because of his ties to Stalin.
He had a number of tough assignments, from serving as the Politburo troubleshooter in the Ukraine in the 1920's to being Moscow boss at a time when the city was torn up and its ultra-ornate subway system built. He was also involved in some of Communism's most ruthless experiences, the collectivization of agriculture and the vast party purges in the 1930's.
As a member of Stalin's State Defense Committee, which ran the Government during World War II, he oversaw transportation and the organization of war industries. A Ruthless Bureaucrat
With paradoxical timing, he died a passive, blind pensioner on Thursday, just as President Mikhail S. Gorbachev offered his latest initiative to lead the party from the totalitarian structure that Kaganovich had helped shape.