Down, but Still Breathing

In the familiar line of cold, grey faces atop Lenin's cold, red tomb, watching the Red Square parades pass by, one mustachioed figure was always seen quite close to Stalin. He was First Deputy Premier Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich, onetime tanner's apprentice who became an able and ruthless administrator. Stalin was rumored to have married Kaganovich's sister Roza, though this has never been established as fact.

An Old Bolshevik, Kaganovich supported Stalin against Trotsky in the fight for power after Lenin died and was rewarded in 1930 with a Politburo seat and the first-secretaryship of the powerful Moscow Party Committee. It was in this job that he took under his political wing a mild-mannered and goateed young functionary named Nikolai Bulganin.

Always something of a maverick--he was the only Jew among top Soviet leaders to survive the purges--Kaganovich won Stalin's approval for his loyalty and toughness and got one top job after another. He played an important role in the party purges, was put in charge of the construction of the famed Moscow Metro and finally he became czar of Russia's railroads, a job that he pursued with such vigor during World War II that he instituted the death penalty for failure to make trains run on time. With responsibilities came rewards: his home town was named after him; so were half a dozen cities throughout the Soviet Union; so was the Moscow Metro.

After the war Stalin gave him the vital Ministry of Building Materials, then rushed him off to the Ukraine to put out fires of rebellion that the local party boss, another Kaganovich protege, Khrushchev, seemed unable to handle. Later in Moscow, Kaganovich was placed in charge of labor.

Last week a two-paragraph item in Pravda reported that Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich, at his own request, had resigned his post as labor boss of Russia. His successor is Alexander Petrovich Volkov, chairman of the rubber-stamp Council of the Union, and a man so little known that the latest edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia does not even list him.

Thus, like two other Old Bolsheviks before him--Comrades Molotov and Miko-yan--Lazar Kaganovich, at 62, has lost his big job, but not his head. One by one the Old Stalinists are disappearing from sight so that two other Old Stalinists, Bulganin and Khrushchev, can get on with their story that the heirs of Stalin had nothing to do with him.

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