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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783080571 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2013 |
| Series: | Anthem Series on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies |
| Pages: | 390 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Iron Lazar
A Political Biography of Lazar Kaganovich
By E. A. Rees
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2013 E. A. ReesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-088-5
CHAPTER 1
THE MAKING OF A BOLSHEVIK, 1893–1917
The Russian Empire in which Lazar Kaganovich grew up was convulsed by upheavals which threatened the very survival of the state. Under Nicholas II, the autocracy sought to transform itself into a modernizing state. The industrialization drive, directed by finance minister Sergei Witte in the 1890s, had a profound impact on the whole country. The defeat of the imperial navy and army by Japan in the Far East in 1904–5 administered a major shock to the state. Peasant resentments and working-class protests ignited the abortive 1905 revolution. The dynasty's claims to legitimacy were seriously compromised. The tsar's gestures toward constitutional reform by means of the October Manifesto were followed by a new repression under Piotr Stolypin combined with an attempt to reform agriculture. From 1909 onward, the rearmament drive stimulated economic recovery. The tsarist regime was beset by the dilemma of promoting industrial development while dealing with the backwardness of agriculture, and preserving Russia's standing as a major power while addressing the demands for domestic reform.
The autocracy was heavily dependent on the support of privileged society and of the backing provided by the state administration, the police and the armed forces. The advocates of constitutional reform drew on a narrow base of middle-class support. Peasant radicalism posed a direct threat to the existence of landed interests. The working class, although numerically small, was characterized by its radical temper. The non-Russian nationalities provided the base for secessionist movements. The political opposition in Russia was strongly revolutionary in outlook – Socialist Revolutionary, Social Democratic, Trudoviki, Bundist and Anarchist. Russian Marxists, perplexed by the failure of a Russian bourgeois revolution, embraced a militant, revolutionary variant of Marxism that rejected reformism. From 1905 to 1917 the society was polarized between the advocates of autocratic order and of revolutionary transformation.
Lazar Kaganovich's early life was shaped by the stresses and tensions through which the society passed in these years. It was influenced by the political choices that were available, as expressed by the various political parties. But individuals are not simply the product of circumstances, they are active agents who interpret their circumstances, who make choices in their lives and fashion their own identities. The early life of Kaganovich illustrates what he shared in common with the generation of young radicals that grew up in this period and what was distinctive about his own experience. It sheds light on the way in which he became a Bolshevik and highlights the nature of Bolshevism as a political movement in this period and its appeal to revolutionary, young workers.
Family and Childhood
Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich was born and brought up in the village of Kabany, Kiev province, 30 kilometres from Chernobyl. This was part of the region of Polese that constituted part of the Jewish pale of settlement. The surrounding countryside, well wooded with rivers and lakes, was rich in wildlife. According to Kaganovich's recollections, Kabany had about 300 households, of which five to ten were rich 'kulaks' and 30 were well-to-do peasants. He recalled how the poor peasants and landless labourers (batraks) were exploited by the kulaks and middle peasants. The population was predominantly Ukrainian, with some Byelorussians and Jews. Ukrainian was the language of the village. The Jewish families lived together in what was termed the 'colony', which comprised about 20 families, most of whom were poor artisans. The Kaganovich family was the only Jewish family to live outside the colony, but they had relatives and friends in the colony.
Kaganovich's father, Moisei, was born in Kabany in 1863, and lived there all his life. He had a brother who emigrated to America. Moisei received no education and began work at 13 years of age as an agricultural labourer, then worked in timberfelling, and then in a wood-resin tar factory. His wife, Genia Dubinskaya, was born and grew up in a small town near Chernobyl in a family of coppersmiths. Genia gave birth to thirteen children, of whom six survived – five sons (Izrail, Aron, Mikhail, Yuli and Lazar) and one daughter (Rachel). Lazar was born on 23 November 1893. The youngest and the favourite, he was the 'Benjamin of the family'.
The family was poor and their circumstances became more difficult when Moisei was badly burnt in an accident with a boiler at work. His health remained poor thereafter, and he died of bronchial asthma in 1923. Moisei leased a plot of land to grow potatoes, vegetables and buckwheat. He tried to go on seasonal work at a local brickyard, with Yuli and Lazar to help him. But Genia became the main breadwinner, through dressmaking, dying wool and baking. The children also earned money picking sugarbeet on the nearby Khorvat estate. The family received help from Genia's brother, Mikhail. Things eased when the two eldest sons began work, Izrail in timber felling, and Aron as a joiner. The family was able to move from their earth-and-turf hovel (stepka) to a larger one-room, wooden-planked cottage (khat). They slept on benches. But they now had a stove and oil lamps, with more space to entertain friends and neighbours, and the house often overflowed with people.
Lazar Kaganovich's brother Mikhail began work in 1903 as a metal worker in Chernobyl and then Kiev. In 1905 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Party and, in Kaganovich's words, became 'a fearless revolutionary'. The Russo–Japanese War stirred popular ferment, while the land question continued to agitate the peasants. At the village of Lubyanka, three kilometres from Kabany, there was a peasant uprising. The grenadiers, who were sent to suppress it, were quartered in Kabany. The poor peasants of Kabany, Kaganovich recalled, sympathized with their neighbours in Lubyanka.
The population of Kabany was mixed, and Kaganovich recalled that the children of the poor and middle peasants – Russian, Ukrainian, Jews, Poles and Byelorussians – socialised freely. Zionist ideas had little influence among the poor Jewish workers, and among Russian and Ukrainian workers there was little anti-Semitism. However, the Jewish population of Kabany was well aware of the pogroms in Odessa, Kishinev and elsewhere.
Although his parents were practically illiterate, they brought up their children with intelligence and tact. It was a close family. They lived modestly and were self-reliant. Mosei had a quiet temperament, never scolded the children, but was serious and supportive. Genia was an important influence. Kaganovich describes her as proud, religious and with a love of life. After the marriage of her daughter Rachel, Yuli and Lazar had to help at home. The children were brought up with a love of labour and a sense of social justice.
The family name 'Kaganovich' (pronounced ka.gan.o.vich, with the stress on the 'o') was the same in root as Kagan, Kahan and Cohen, indicating a family descended from a rabbi. The memoirs make no mention of the family attending the synagogue, nor of their observation of Jewish customs and rituals. We might infer that they were still quite conventional in these matters. In his personal file written in the early twenties, Lazar recorded that he knew Russian, Ukrainian and had a weak command of Yiddish.
Kaganovich attended a Jewish school (kheder) attached to the synagogue in the Jewish colony. Thereafter, the Jewish families enlisted the services of a teacher from Chernobyl, but this school was closed down by the school inspector. He was then sent with his brother Yuli to a school in Martynovich, where they were taught the Bible and the Talmud, Russian and general subjects. The two brothers travelled from Kabany to Martynovich, taking their food with them and staying in lodgings. The school gave him the basis for self-education and a passion for self-improvement. Yuli, Lazar recalled, was his favourite brother; he had a kindly disposition. But he himself, he admits, was temperamentally closer to his brother Mikhail, and had a 'stormy character'.
He finished school at the age of thirteen, and was then apprenticed to a blacksmith in the nearby town of Khochava. In the local library he immersed himself in reading the literary classics, Dickens and Victor Hugo. As well as the Russian classics, he read the brochures and newspapers which Mikhail brought from Kiev. Kaganovich recounts that as an adolescent he was quite widely read in history.
In his memoirs Kaganovich refers to how in his youth he was attracted by the Book of Amos in the Hebrew Bible – with its condemnation of the rich and powerful. It also depicts a jealous and vengeful God, Yahweh, 'the God of Armies', who directs his wrath at the children of Israel for their transgressions. We can only speculate as to how far he was drawn by the same apocalyptic and messianic side of Bolshevism.
Maxim Gorky was a favourite author. His stories from this period deal with the life of the lower classes and celebrate the strong figures who, by an assertion of will, were able to master their fate, and carry a strong Nietzschean theme. He also admired the German Social Democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht's tale The Spider and the Fly. The gist of this story is that the downtrodden and the oppressed, though weak and divided, can assert themselves through organization and leadership. His first introduction to philosophy was Spinoza's Ethics, and for a time, he recalled, he was drawn to 'idealistic pessimism' before embracing a materialist understanding of history. When he had money, he visited the bookshops. The purchase of a lamp to allow him to read at night was an important event.
The World of Work
His career as an apprentice blacksmith was short-lived. He moved to Kiev and there worked with his brother Mikhail in a scrap metal yard. They stayed in a dosshouse in Nizhnyi Val. As a result of illness brought on by this work, he had to return home to recuperate for three months. Through tutoring the children of his uncle Aron in Russian, he was able to raise enough money to return to Kiev.
There, he took a series of heavy manual jobs, working twelve hours a day for meagre wages. He worked mainly in the bustling district of Podol, with its shops, workshops, large enterprises, wharves and ship repair yards. Many of the owners and a large proportion of the workers were Jews. In prolonged periods of unemployment, he spent his time on Kreshatik Boulevard and Bibikovsky Boulevard. In observing the lives of the various social classes, he recalls, he came to despise the unfeeling rich and scorn the petty bourgeoisie. At 14 years of age in 1907, he began working as a shoemaker in factories and workshops. When he was just 16 years old, he organized his first worker self-education group. His attitude toward the working class, however, was not uncritical; he sharply distinguished between the backward and progressive elements in the proletariat. The possibility of further study at school or university was an impossible dream, but it may be that there was a stage in his teens when he aspired to such a course.
Kiev was a large, prosperous city, a centre of administration, education and culture. It possessed a large middle class and politically was fairly quiescent but developed into a stronghold of Ukrainian nationalism. Among the revolutionary parties, the Bolsheviks competed with Zionists, Bundists, Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Anarchists to recruit Jewish youth. The political repression following the defeat of the 1905 revolution slowly ebbed. Gradually, political opposition began to revive, with the Kiev Social Democrats issuing leaflets on 1 May 1910. The revolutionaries directed their attention at the city's large contingent of railway workers. The district of Podol had a particular reputation because of its many politically educated, young workers.
Kiev, with its cosmopolitan make up – Ukrainians, Russians, Poles, Germans, and Jews – was a place where racial animosities could easily be stirred. In 1911 the infamous Beilis case took place, in which a Jewish worker from the city was accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child. Anti-Semitic feelings were whipped up by the Black Hundred organizations, 'The Union of the Archangel Mikhail' and 'The Twin-Headed Eagle', with the connivance of leading public figures, including the minister of justice. Radical parties mobilized in protest and on 4 October many factories, especially in Podol, went on a demonstrative strike. The assassination of Piotr Stolypin, the prime minister, in the Kiev Opera House on 1 September 1911, caused a huge stir, with attempts by 'The Twin-Headed Eagle' to whip up a pogrom. The Bolsheviks took measures to protect themselves and to rebuff this threat.
Kaganovich only joined the Bolshevik party after these momentous events. In his retirement he claimed that he was introduced to the Bolsheviks by his brother Mikhail and had joined the party in August 1911. He declared: 'I entered the Great university of the revolution, the university of the great party – the university of Lenin!' This is not quite true. In his autobiographical sketch, which he was required to write for the party in the early 1920s, he revealed that his initial contact with revolutionaries was with Grabovsky, a Menshevik with whom he worked. He established links with the Bolsheviks only after January 1912, and he appears to have become a member later that year. Notwithstanding his claim to see his brother Mikhail as a role model, Lazar Kaganovich joined the Bolshevik party seven years after him.
The Bolshevik party, headed by V. I. Lenin, represented the most revolutionary wing of Russian Social Democracy. For self-educated workers, Marxism offered a powerful tool for analysing the world, and engendered a great self-confidence. Admission into the party was closely regulated, and membership was coveted by young radicals. The two brothers defined themselves as Bolsheviks, not Mensheviks or Socialist Revolutionaries, and they had rejected the main Jewish socialist organization, the Bund. Three other brothers – Aron, Izrail and Yuli – joined the Bolshevik party after the Revolution, but, Kaganovich claims, their attitude was revolutionary before then.
The choice of the Bolshevik party was significant in another sense. The Menshevik party was stronger than the Bolsheviks in Ukraine and the south generally, even in key industrial centres such as Ekaterinoslav. The Mensheviks recruited strongly from the national minorities, such as Jews and Georgians, whereas the Bolsheviks recruited predominantly from the Great Russians, although a significant number of their leading figures were Jews. The Bolsheviks were successful in recruiting young workers who had newly arrived in industry. By 1907 the Bolshevik party had about 46,000 members. For a core who became members, this was to be a lifetime's commitment. Lenin's conception of the vanguard party, guided by a doctrinaire reading of Marxism, as outlined in 'What is to Be Done?' of 1903, led several fellow Marxists to characterize him as a 'Jacobin'. Bolshevism, as critics such as Nikolai Berdayev and Semon Frank were quick to point out, manifested a form of quasi-religious messianism, moral and legal nihilism, and subscribed to a form of party idolatry.
Kaganovich recalls that he began studying Lenin's works, and his article 'Stolypin and Revolution', written following Stolypin's assassination, made a big impression. While liberal journalists deplored this outrage, Lenin characterized Stolypin as the head of the 'counter-revolutionary government', the 'arch-hangman', and an organizer of Black Hundred gangs and anti-Semitic pogroms. The 'semi-Asiatic, feudal Russian monarchy', Lenin declared, could defend itself only 'by the most infamous, most disgusting, vile and cruel means.'
In 1911 a Kiev city party conference elected a committee. Yu. L. Pyatakov, the son of a wealthy Kiev sugar magnate, who had been expelled from St. Petersburg as a student agitator, was its leader. Another prominent member was Evgeniya Bosh. In June 1912 the arrest of Pyatakov and other committee members precipitated the collapse of the city's party organization. In 1917 Pyatakov and Bosh returned to take charge of the Kiev party organization, but by this time Kaganovich had moved elsewhere.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Iron Lazar by E. A. Rees. Copyright © 2013 E. A. Rees. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures; Introduction; Chapter 1. The Making of a Bolshevik, 1893–1917; Chapter 2. Red Terror and Civil War, 1918–1921; Chapter 3. Building the Monolithic Party, 1922–1927; Chapter 4. Ukrainian Party Boss, 1925–1928; Chapter 5. The Triumph of the Stalin Faction, 1928–1929; Chapter 6. Revolution from Above, 1928–1935; Chapter 7. Stalin’s Deputy, 1930–1935; Chapter 8. Moscow Party Boss, 1930–1935; Chapter 9. Boss of Rail Transport, 1935–1937; Chapter 10. Political and Social Revolution through Terror, 1936–1938; Chapter 11. The Man; Chapter 12. The Despot’s Creature, 1939–1953; Chapter 13. De-Stalinization and Nemesis, 1953–1991; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Name Index; Subject IndexWhat People are Saying About This
‘Lazar Kaganovich was one of the key figures in the Stalin administration – so much overlooked, yet so important. Arfon Rees, in this first exhaustive account, brings Kaganovich to the front of the historical stage. Without men like Kaganovich, Stalin would never have made his own impact on Soviet and world history.’ —Professor Robert Service, University of Oxford, author of ‘Stalin: A Biography’
‘Stalin did not create Stalinism single-handedly. Lazar Kaganovich, a doer more than a thinker or writer, was one of the leaders of Team Stalin. This excellent biography casts fascinating new light on the people that together built one of the great dictatorships of the twentieth century.’ —Professor Mark Harrison, University of Warwick