Visiting with Stalin's Factotum
SOSIN, GENE
Visiting with Stalin's Factotum The Wolf of the Kremlin By Stuart Kahan Morrow. 331 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Gene Sosin Former Director of Program Planning, Radio Free Europe/ Radio...
...Lazar, 31, already a seasoned Bolshevik operator, is a candidate-member of the Central Committee, in Moscow after crushing a separatist movement in Turkestan...
...You understand what you are saying, Lazar Moiseyevich?' "He understood precisely what he was saying...
...Lazar's eyes widened...
...Stuart Kahan, an American journalist, visited his "Uncle Lazar" in 1981 and persuaded the untrusting old man to talk about his life...
...It had come so fast...
...Kahan reconstructs dramatic events in which his "uncle" played a role, frequently reminding me of the old CBS radio program, You Are There...
...Perhaps he was looking for something more destructive than a tape recorder...
...In his respected samizdat work, Let History Judge, Medvedev says that Peretz Markish and the others were actually arrested much earlier, between 1948-50...
...Mikhail pleads with his brother to save him, but Lazar merely slips him a gun so that he can commit suicide...
...It records the rise and fall of the individual who was arguably the most energetic, opportunistic and ruthless of Stalin's henchmen—the dictator's "factotum," as Isaac Deutscher called him...
...As for "aunt" Roza, prominent scholars of Soviet history in the West doubt that she was Stalin's wife...
...Among the minor ones: Stalin was born in Gori, not Tbilisi...
...The 1973 edition of the encyclopedia, however, contains no entry for Kaganovich, neither the man nor the town...
...Kaganovich boldly encourages his boss to call for the establishment of socialism in Soviet Russia first...
...In fact, he made sure I emptied my pockets before he would say anything...
...At the beginning of the book a photostat of an affidavit signed by his father...
...Similarly, Kahan's statement that Peter [sic] Markish and other famous Yiddish writers were rounded up by the MGB on the fatal night of August 12, 1952 does not square with reliable sources in the West nor with Roy Medvedev, the Moscow-based Soviet dissident historian...
...He had decided to cast the die again...
...It was dangerous, he realized, but he had no choice...
...Maybe someday Moscow TV will broadcast "contraStalin" hearings direct from the Supreme Soviet...
...His hometown has been renamed Novokashirsk and he has become an unperson, like many of his comrades of the 1930s whom he helped Stalin to purge...
...the Kazan cathedral in Leningrad is not the one built on the spot where Alexander II was assassinated...
...There were not too many options open to him at his age and position...
...Lazar quickly did the same...
...Member of the CPSU since 1911...
...They won't learn Ukrainian, they won't use it, they insist on staying apart from what we are doing...
...Member of the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee, first deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers...
...I am more troubled, though, by Kalian's claim to be Kaganovich's nephew...
...He urges his sister, Roza, to become Stalin's third wife, further solidifying his relationship with the vozhd, or chief...
...Various versions of Stalin's death advanced in the West—e.g...
...He studied Lazar, eyeing him suspiciously...
...But, Comrade Stalin, you control the Party organization...
...I would send them there—all of them...
...Soon Lazar is named secretary-general of the Ukrainian CP, and takes Khrushchev with him to Kiev "to handle most of the petty chores...
...Stalin, a leather-dresser worker and professional revolutionary...
...But Khrushchev refrained from liquidating them...
...Jack Kahan, indicates that the author's relationship to Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich is lhal of asecond cousin...
...22 November 1893)—one of the most prominent figures in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet government, a loyal follower of V.l...
...Lenin, and comrade-in-arms of I.V...
...Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR...
...At the Kremlin Stalin pours cognac into two small glasses and drinks to Lazar's health...
...Then he seeks Kaganovich's opinion of Trotsky's essays advocating permanent revolution...
...Kaganovich was born into a poor Jewish family in the village of Kabany (now Kaganovich) in the province of Kiev...
...Thus, we are present at the first meeting between Kaganovich and Stalin in December 1924...
...They speak only Yiddish...
...He thereby shows his final and most dramatic allegiance to Stalin...
...The job enables him to supervise all Party and government activities throughout the country, as he helps Stalin bring in loyal people like himself...
...that Beria murdered him—are dismissed by Medvedev, who concludes that "there is no reason to believe that Stalin's death was not the natural consequence of illness and old age.' Perhaps Mikhail S. Gorbachev's recent announcement of the establishment of a special commission to rewrite the history of the Communist Party in the USSR will result at last in total glasnost about the "enormous and unforgivable" acts of lawlessness perpetrated by Stalin, Kaganovich, and the rest of the Moscow Mafia during the bloody quarter-century of the dictators rule...
...In the first year of the terror alone, Lazar supervises the purge of nearly half a million people...
...Diligently working his way up the Party ladder, Kaganovich ultimately reaches the top echelon by hitching his wagon to Stalin's red star during the power struggle following Lenin's death in 1924...
...What do they want, anyway, their own country...
...Kaganovich was permitted to manage a potash plant in the Urals until he retired in Moscow, where he still lives quietly at age 94...
...Bend over backward and kiss their ass...
...Kaganovich slaps a bottle into Molotov's hand, Bulganin cradles Stalin's head, and Molotov pours a deadly overdose of a drug down the dictator's throat...
...Then he leaned back in his chair again and fingered the butt of his cigarette...
...I wish there were such a place...
...And, of course, no recording devices of any kind...
...I am further disturbed by Kahan's assertion that Solomon Mikhoels, the world renowned Yiddish actor, director and public figure, was "shot to death in Minsk during a performance of King Lear" in 1949...
...in his honor it is named the Kaganovich Metro...
...He resolves to uproot himself from this humiliating heritage, joins the revolutionary movement and becomes a Bolshevik at age 18...
...And you understand the consequences, Lazar Moiseyevich?' "He knew exactly what would happen...
...He would not permit notes to be taken, or even photographs...
...Why this discrepancy...
...In 1957, he was removed from power by his subordinates of earlier years, Nikita S. Khrushchev, who also got rid of other members of the "anti-Party group," including Vyacheslav M. Molotov and Georgi M. Malenkov...
...He reconstructs Moscow and builds the subway at a furious pace...
...Now he was being tested, and he didn't know if he was prepared...
...Finally, the most dubious part of Kalian's book is the description of the murder of Stalin by his lieutenants, who fear for their own lives after their paranoid leader concocts the anti-Semitic "doctor's plot...
...He could only hope it was the right one...
...Trotsky's concept has the order reversed...
...Your view should prevail...
...Despite the author's resolve to corroborate his sources, the book contains a number of factual errors...
...Upon discovering that the Jewish revolutionary youth there refuse to yield to the Party line, that they insist on keeping their own identity, he screams at Khrushchev: "Goddamn them, what do they think I will do...
...Kahan describes Stalin's reaction: "The word control caught Stalin's ear...
...From this "oral interview" (in the strictest sense of the term), plus conversations with relatives in the United States, and the use of newspapers and scholarly sources, Kahan has fashioned areadable book that is part documentary, part alleged psychohistory...
...This inaugurated the dictator's campaign against Jewish intellectuals and Jewish cultural institutions...
...We watch Lazar growing up in the Pale of Settlement, resenting his family's passivity in the face of repeated Cossack plundering of Jewish homes...
...Back in Moscow, and the most important Jew in a hierarchy led by a visceral anti-Semite, Kaganovich ensures his survival and advancement by taking a leading role in ridding the party of Stalin's enemies, especially after the murder of popular Leningrad Party leader Sergei M. Kirov in 1934...
...Three more columns continue to describe in detail Kaganovich's many impressive contributions to the Bolshevik revolutionary movement and to the strengthening of the Communist regime after 1917...
...A moment later Stalin summons Molotov and introduces Kaganovich as the new head of Central Personnel and Assignments...
...I had no choice but to listen carefully in order to remember everything he said," writes Kahan...
...Molotov's wife was Zhemchuzhina, not Zhumchuzkina or Zhumchuzhina as the book refers to her...
...The decision had to be made...
...He sat upright in his chair...
...But until the archives that haven't been burned are opened, I suppose there is no harm in enjoying stories like The Wolf of the Kremlin—as long as you first take a large dose of salt...
...When his brother, Mikhail, whom he had made deputy commissar of heavy industry, is falsely accused of wartime treason by Stalin, Lazar agrees that Mikhail should be arrested, and in another of the You Are There scenes we attend the hearings conducted by Anastas I. Mikoyan...
...Reviewed by Gene Sosin Former Director of Program Planning, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, New York The Large Soviet Encyclopedia has the following entry in its 1953 edition: "Kaganovich, Lazar Moiseyevich (b...
...According to Mikhoels' daughter, Natalia (now in Israel), and Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, Mikhoels died in an automobile "accident" late at night on January 13,1948...
...He said the first thing that came into his mind...
...Who knows...
...I would have to find other sources to corroborate...
...There was so much, too much...
...Kahan pulls no punches in portraying his "uncle" as cynically choosing Stalin's path even if it means turning on his own people...
Vol. 70 • November 1987 • No. 17
