Lazar Kaganovich

Born to a Jewish family in Ukraine in 1893, Kaganovich worked as a shoemaker before joining the Bolsheviks in 1911. He rose through party ranks after the 1917 Revolution, consolidating Soviet rule across Belarus, Russia, and Turkestan. Stalin placed him in charge of a key organizational department in 1922, using him to tighten control over the party apparatus. By 1930 Kaganovich had become a full Politburo member and Stalin's deputy party secretary; two years later, as First Secretary in Ukraine, he helped enforce grain quotas that contributed directly to the Holodomor famine. Through the 1930s and 1940s he held commissar posts overseeing railways, heavy industry, and oil, and sat on the State Defence Committee during the Second World War. Khrushchev's rise stripped him of power: after a failed 1957 coup attempt, Kaganovich was demoted to managing a potash works in Perm, then a cement plant in the Urals, expelled from the party in 1961, and left to live as a Moscow pensioner until his death at 97 - the last surviving Old Bolshevik.