#Lazar Kaganovich

[revolutionary-marxism]

The Last Bolshevik speaks

An expect from KAGANOVICH SPEAKS 'WE ARE NOT MONSTERS' one of Lazar's last interviews taken from the archives of La Repubblica, the interview was conducted via written questions with answers recorded by tape and published in 1990 a year before Kaganovich would pass of natural causes at 97, 5 months before the dissolving of the USSR

Q: You were a great propagandist and leader. If you could address Soviet citizens, what would you say today?

A: I would tell them to continue fighting the battle for communism, for the ideas of Marx and Lenin. I would say that we are facing the resurgence of nationalism and chauvinism. Ah, of course, if I had an audience like the ones I was used to since I was a boy... When I was sixteen, I once organized a meeting of young workers on the problem of literacy and school education. I had more culture than them, I was a learned young man. But they understood me. You have to know how to talk to young people. And today's youth seems to me to be at a much lower level than the workers I spoke to in 1913. They are a youth ready to be dragged along by anyone. With them we should start again from the beginning, from the ABC.... Yet there is a great debate in society, young people are active in movements of all kinds, they talk about everything... Yes, they discuss, but about what? When I read the petty interviews of certain former members of the Politburo, or certain memoirs... They tell the story like this: I went, he came, he said, I said... But what does that mean? What does it mean? We need to talk about ideas. Of ideas! Of substance! Of content! Instead, what are our so-called public movements talking about today? There are at least fifty of them, and fewer than fifteen parties never participate in the various elections. And they all only create confusion in the minds of young people. If I had to speak, first of all I would distinguish. You have to address old managers in one way, middle managers in another way, petty bourgeois and philistines in yet another way... and then you have to address the enemy in a different way, you talk to the enemy as he deserves. And that's where I would start. I would say: be careful, comrades, they are attacking us! Bourgeois ideology is on the attack, and it must be recognized that it has won many battles at this moment. What is happening in Poland? And in Hungary? We are retreating! And what is happening in Poland and Hungary is the premise of what can happen here too. It's something that makes me sick. It makes me cry. Why has my health gotten worse? Because it worries me when I see what is happening in Eastern Europe, in Germany.

Lazar M. Kaganovich

[thespoliarium]

Meet the Politburo...

Red Monarch (1983, dir. Jack Gold) || The Death of Stalin (2017, dir. Armando Iannucci)

[ohsalome]

- Serhii Plokhy "The Gates of Europe - History of Ukraine"

[warsofasoiaf]

Besides Beria or Khrushchev, were there any other actual contenders to take over after Stalin's death?

The Anti-Party Group, which was led by Malenkov, Molotov, and Kaganovich, although their move was to appoint Bulganin so he technically would have been the new First Secretary.

Thanks for the question, George.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[zarya-zaryanitsa]

Stalinist attitudes towards homosexuality and the events surroudning criminalization of homosexuality in Soviet Union in 1934 - excerpts from professor Dan Healey’s book „Russian homophobia from Stalin to Sochi”

In the same chapter I analyze the Soviet return to a ban on “sodomy” in 1933-34. It was a Stalinist measure, proposed by the security police and backed with relish by Stalin and his Politburo. Stalin personally edited the new penal article. This was the moment when the Soviet state adopted a modern anti-homosexual politics, the birth of modern Russian political homophobia. (…)

On September 15, 1933, deputy chief of the OGPU (secret police) Genrikh Yagoda proposed to Stalin that a law against “pederasty” was needed urgently. Stalin and Yagoda used the crude term pederastiia to discuss male homosexuality; but government lawyers revived the tsarist term muzhelozhstvo (sodomy) for the published law that was eventually adopted in March 1934. Yagoda reported that in August-September 1933, OGPU raids had been conducted on circles of “pederasts” in Moscow and Leningrad, and other cities of the Soviet Union. Yagoda wrote that these men were guilty of spying; they had also “politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy.” From a recent collection of FSB archive documents of political cases against young Communists, it is clear that during the early 1930s, the secret police were obsessed with detecting counterrevolutionary moods among young people. Stalin forwarded Yagoda’s letter to Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich, noting that “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment” and directing a law against “pederasty” should be adopted. In the months that followed, Yagoda the secret policeman steered its passage through the various legislative drafts. (…)

When in mid-September 1933 Yagoda wrote to Stalin, recommending the adoption of a formal law against sodomy, he apparently cited a figure of 130 arrests of “pederasts” for the operations in “Moscow and Leningrad.” According to Ivanov, the archives of the St. Petersburg FSB reveal that during August-September 1933, 175 men were arrested on grounds of homosexual relations in Leningrad alone. The raids on “pederasts” continued and probably expanded to the principal “regime” cities, including Kharkov and Kiev. It appears that somewhere inside the central secret police machinery, an order originated in late July or early August 1933 to begin arrests of “pederasts” known to the authorities on their card-indexes either as “anti-social” or “declassed” elements, or as a security threat with international dimensions. (…)

In the 1993 release of correspondence between Yagoda and Stalin leading to the sodomy ban, one other significant document was published from the same file in the Presidential Archive. It is a sixteen-page letter to Stalin, from a homosexual British Communist, Harry O. Whyte (1907-60), an ex­ patriate journalist living in Moscow who loved a man who was a Soviet citizen. His Soviet lover was arrested sometime during late 1933 or early 1934. The release of the Whyte letter said little about its provenance and the author. It was typical of the 1993 publication that this document also appeared without commentary, but was labeled “Humor from the Special Collections” by archivists or editors who failed to show any historical empathy or intellectual curiosity.

Whyte, who worked for the English-language Moscow Daily News, wrote to Stalin, in May 1934, asking him to justify the new law. The journalist boldly explained why it violated the principles of both Marxism and the Soviet revolution. He argued that persecution of the law-abiding homosexual was typical of capitalist regimes and fascist ones: Nazi Germany’s “racial purity” drive was just the most extreme example of the push in both systems for “labor reserves and cannon fodder.” “Constitutional homosexuals, as an insignificant portion of the population . . . cannot present a threat to the birth rate in a socialist state.” Their position was analogous to that of other unjustly persecuted groups: “women, colored races, national minorities” and the best traditions of socialism showed tolerance of the relatively insignificant number of naturally occurring homosexuals in the population. He asked Stalin, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fit to become a member of the Communist Party?” In a revealing reaction, Stalin scrawled across the letter, “An idiot and a degenerate. To the archives.” Whyte got a blunt answer to his question: he was expelled from the Communist Party; he hastily left the Soviet Union for England in 1935. (…)

The dictator turned to his cultural spokesman Maxim Gorky, to explain the law’s rationale for Soviet and European readers. Gorky wrote an article that appeared in Izvestiia and Pravda on May 23, 1934, and later in a German-language socialist newspaper in Switzerland, in which he compared healthy Soviet youth to the degenerate youth of Nazi Germany. “Destroy the homosexuals - and fascism will disappear” he concluded, propounding the genocide of a social group on the grounds of sexuality. Later in 1936, People’s Commissar of Justice Nikolai V. Krylenko gave a speech to the central Soviet legislature in which he explained that the law was necessary because homosexuals were not healthy workers but “a declassed rabble, or the scum of society, or remnants of the exploiting classes.”

[commiearabgirl-2]

[20thpresidium]

Press Release from Podgorny

Hello comrades, Mikoyan has shocked us all. We are supposed to be brothers in arms, living in unity in this great motherland. However, Anatas Mikoyan, the Minister of Forestry and the former Minister of Heavy Industry and Engineering, have attempted assassinations on our beloved comrades, Comrade Khrushchev and Comrade Zhukov. Mikoyan, are you not shameful of your own actions. Comrade Khrushchev and Comrade Zhukov are our beloved friends, our brothers. Yet, you attempt an assassination and BLAME IT ON OUR BELOVED COMRADE, Lazar Kaganovich! Shameless! Prosperous!

[katchwreck]

Voronezh Military Revolutionary Committee and its chairman Lazar Kaganovich.

Autumn, 1919.

[historyisveryserious]

Lazar Pointer

A cursed image.

[dynamobooks]

Fabien Nury & Thierry Robin: The Death of Stalin (2012)

[revolutionary-marxism]

"Of course, I know what they say. They read me newspapers. And I hear incredible things. But what is happening in our Soviet Union? First they deny Stalin, now, little by little, they come to try socialism, the October revolution, and in no time at all they will want to put Lenin and Marx on trial too. If we want to call everything into question, however, we would need to address our history globally, within the history of human thought, the history of class struggle, the history of revolutions. Today, however, everything is mixed up, dejected, bourgeois arguments and communist reasons, schizophrenic discussions in which only nonsense is spoken."

Lazar Kaganovich, speaking to La Repubblica on the political situation within the USSR in 1990

[thespoliarium]

I WAS BORED OKAY

[ohsalome]

- Serhii Plokhy "The Gates of Europe - History of Ukraine"

[warsofasoiaf]

Was ‘Iron’ Lazar Kaganovich a potential candidate to succeed Stalin? Or did he not want to be Premier of the SU?

He was a leading figure in the "Anti-Party" group but they had coalesced behind Bulganin. They did so because Bulganin was very popular with the reformists (who Khrushchev championed), so they could sell their attempt to oust Khrushchev as a principled stand against Khrushchev's increasing centralization and not a partisan affair.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[alliluyevas]

was thinking about Kremlin Wives by Larissa Vasileva again (specifically interviewing subjects as a historian) and about how she primarily interviews female relatives of the women she profiles (rather than male relatives) and I’m guessing that’s probably a deliberate choice to focus on those relationships, but also I’m wondering if female interview subjects might be more willing to meet with a female historian and same with male subjects and male historians? Like she interviewed both of Polina Molotova’s granddaughters but not her grandson, and she interviewed Victoria Brezhneva’s daughter-in-law but not her son. But yeah idk if she sought out female subjects or whether these women were more responsive.

[gatheringbones]

[“Old age means, first and foremost, loneliness. The last old man I knew—he lived in the adjacent courtyard—died five years ago, or maybe it’s been even longer…seven years ago…I’m surrounded by strangers. People come from the museum, the archive, the encyclopedia…I’m like a reference book, a living library! But I have no one to talk to…Who would I like to talk to? Lazar Kaganovich would be good…There aren’t many of us who are still around, and even fewer who aren’t completely senile. He’s even older than me, he’s already ninety. I read in the papers…[He laughs.] In the newspaper, it said that the old men in his courtyard refuse to play dominos with him. Or cards. They drive him away: “Fiend!” And he weeps from the hurt. Ages ago, he was a steel-hearted People’s Commissar. He’d sign the execution lists, he sent tens of thousands of people to their deaths. Spent thirty years by Stalin’s side. But in his old age, he doesn’t even have anyone to play dominoes with…[After this, he speaks very quietly. I can’t tell what he’s saying, I only catch a few words.] It’s scary…Living too long is scary.”]

Svetlana Alexeivich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets