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Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich (Template:Lang-ru) (November 22, 1893–July 25, 1991) was a Soviet politician and a close associate of Joseph Stalin.

He was born in 1893 to Jewish parents in Kubany near Kiev. Kaganovich never received a formal education, he was self taught and worked as a shoe repairman. In 1911 he joined the communist party, and in 1924 became a member of the Central Committee.

In 1930, he became a member of the Soviet Politburo, and during the 1930s he oversaw the construction of the first phase of the Moscow Metro, which was named after Kaganovich until 1955. He also supervised the implementation of many of Stalin's economic policies, including the collectivization of agriculture and rapid industrialization.

According to Robert Conquest and some modern Ukrainian historians of the period, Kaganovich, in league with Vyacheslav Molotov, engineered the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine or Holodomor which was a planned genocide in which 7 to 10 million Ukrainians died and inflicted enormous suffering on the Soviet Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan, Motivated by the goal of preventing the possible opposition that the relatively self-sufficient peasantry posed. On any analysis, Kaganovich, was one of the worst mass murderers in history. However, other academics in Soviet studies such as Moshe Lewin, Alexander Dallin and Alec Nove dismiss the idea that the famine was a deliberate act.

Also Kaganovich organized and greatly contributed to the building of the first Soviet metro system in Moscow, which was named after him.

In 1944, was launched the new light cruiser Lazar Kaganovich named after Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich, of the project 26-bis, which entered the Soviet Pacific Fleet in December 1944.

Kaganovich was ethnically Jewish by birth. For most of his life he was a staunch atheist. He was, until 1957, a full member of the Politburo and the Presidium. Kaganovich was an early mentor of Nikita Khrushchev, who first rose to prominence as his Moscow City deputy in the 1930s. In 1947, when Khrushchev was stripped of the Party leadership in Ukraine (he remained in the somewhat lesser head of government job), Stalin dispatched Kaganovich to replace him until the former was reinstated late that year.

Kaganovich was a rigid Stalinist, and though he remained in the Presidium, quickly lost influence after Stalin's death in March 1953. In 1957, along with fellow hard-line Stalinists Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, and Georgy Malenkov (the so-called Anti-Party Group), he participated in an abortive party coup against his former protege Khrushchev, who had over the preceding two years become increasingly harsh in his criticism of Stalin. As a result, Kaganovich was forced to retire from the Presidium and the Central Committee, and in 1964 he was expelled from the party.

Kaganovich survived to the age of 97, dying just before the events that led to the final unravelling of the Soviet Union in 1991.

• Soviet politicians
• 1893 births
• 1991 deaths
• History of the Soviet Union and Soviet Russia