How the “Iron Minister” Kaganovich Failed to Discipline Ukrainian Historians: A Stalinist Ideological Campaign Reconsidered

Abstract

In late February 1947, Stalin's trusted troubleshooter Lazar' Kaganovich arrived in Kiev as the Ukrainian Communist Party's new first secretary. Having served consecutively as the Soviet People's Commissar of Railroad Transport, Heavy Industry, and Construction Materials, the notoriously heavy-handed Kaganovich had earned the epithet of zheleznyi narkom (“iron minister”). His tenure at the head of the Ukrainian party organization in March–December 1947 was marked by intensified coercive intervention in the economy and ideological purges in culture and scholarship. In Ukraine, Kaganovich's brief rule is remembered primarily for his relentless attacks on the alleged remnants of “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.” In the works of post-Soviet Ukrainian historians, the 1947 crusade against “nationalism” appears as a comprehensive campaign masterminded by Stalin, planned by his envoy Kaganovich, faithfully implemented by the servile republican functionaries, and submissively endured by the terrorized Ukrainian intellectuals. Clearly, modern Ukrainian historians have adopted the traditional Western concept of Stalinism as a successful totalitarian dictatorship, in which society was no more than a passive object of an all-powerful state.