Lazar Kaganovich

Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich (22 November 1893 – 25 July 1991) was a Soviet Bolshevik politician of Jewish origin who became one of Joseph Stalin's most loyal deputies, ascending to full membership in the Politburo in 1930 and serving in high-level roles including First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine from 1925 to 1928 and People's Commissar for Transport from 1935 onward. As Stalin's enforcer in Ukraine, Kaganovich directed the brutal collectivization campaign starting in 1929, which dismantled private farming through violent dekulakization and excessive grain procurements, directly contributing to the Holodomor—the engineered famine of 1932–1933 that killed millions of Ukrainian peasants. During the Great Purge of the late 1930s, he approved execution quotas and lists targeting perceived enemies within the party and society, overseeing the suppression of dissent that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Kaganovich also supervised major infrastructure projects, such as the rapid expansion of the Moscow Metro, symbolizing Soviet industrialization under duress. His steadfast allegiance to Stalin shielded him from the purges that felled other old revolutionaries, enabling his survival into the post-Stalin era as the last prominent Old Bolshevik, where he resisted de-Stalinization until expulsion from the party in 1957.