Chechnia and Daghestan. London: Frank Cass. Jaimoukha, Amjad. (2001). The Circassians: A Handbook. London: Curzon Press. Jersild, Austin. (2002). Orientalism and Empire: North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1854-1917. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press. Matveeva, Anna. (1999). The North Caucasus: Russia’s Fragile Borderland. Great Britain: The Royal Institute of International Affairs.
KADETS See CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
KAGANOVICH, LAZAR MOYSEYEVICH
(1893-1991), Stalinist; deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union from 1944 to 1957.
Known for his viciousness, Lazar Kaganovich was a staunch Stalinist and a ruthless participant in the purges of the 1930s. Born near Kiev, Ukraine, Kaganovich became active in the Social Democratic Party from 1911 and served as the first secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party from 1925 to 1928. A brilliant administrator, Kaganovich served on the Presidium of the CPSU from 1930 to 1957 and held numerous important posts, including first secretary in the Moscow Party Organization (1930-1935), key administrator of the Agricultural Department of the Central Committee (1933), people’s commissar of transport (1935), and people’s commissar of heavy industry (1935). In December 1944 he was appointed deputy prime minister of the Soviet Union.
An influential proponent of forced collectivization, Kaganovich advocated harsh repression of the rich peasants, or kulaks, in the late 1920s. During the grain procurement campaign of 1932, Kagano-vich headed a commission that was sent to the North Caucasus to speed up grain collection. On November 2 his commission adopted a resolution that called for the violent breakup of kulak sabotage networks and the use of terror to break the resistance of rural communists. The result was the arrest of thousands and the deportation of tens of thousands of rural inhabitants.
His belief in the efficacy of coercion led him to develop a strategy that called for indiscriminate mass repression of workers as a way to increase productivity and punish what he considered anti-Soviet actions in industry. As commissar of transport, Kaganovich was particularly hard on railway men, calling for the death sentence for various offenses that might lead to the breakdown of Soviet transport plans. He devised the so-called theory of counterrevolutionary limit setting on output that he used to destroy hundreds of engineering and technical cadres.
In the Great Purges (1936-1938) Kaganovich took the extreme position that the Party’s interests justified everything. In the summer of 1937 Kaganovich was sent to carry out purges of local Party organizations in Chelyabinsk, Yaroslavl, Ivanovo, and Smolensk. Throughout 1936 and 1937 he also had all his deputies, nearly all road chiefs and political section chiefs, and many other officials in transport arrested without any grounds whatsoever. In August 1937 he demanded that the NKVD (secret police) arrest ten officials in the People’s Commissariat of Transport because he thought their behavior suspicious. All were arrested as spies and shot. He ultimately had thirty-eight transport executives and thousands of Party members arrested.
Following Stalin’s death in 1953, Kaganovich opposed Nikita Khrushchev’s proposal to admit errors committed by the Party under Stalin’s leadership. He remained an oppositionist, eventually allying with Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molo-tov, and Dmitry Shepilov, in the so-called Anti-Party Group that attempted to remove Khrushchev from power in 1957. Following the failed coup, Kaganovich was removed from his position as deputy prime minister and assigned to managing a potash works in Perm oblast. He died there of natural causes in 1991. See also: COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE; KULAKS; PURGES, THE GREAT; STALIN, JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH
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Conquest, Robert. (1990). The Great Terror: A Reassessment. New York: Oxford University Press. Courtois, Stephane, et al. (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Crankshaw, Edward. (1970). Khrushchev Remembers. Boston: Little, Brown. Kahn, Stuart. (1987). The Wolf of the Kremlin. New York: Morrow.
On September 1, 1983, a Soviet SU-15 shot a Korean civilian 747 airliner from the sky. All 269 passengers on board perished. Korean authorities publicly stated the plane had mistakenly strayed off its intended course by some 365 miles. This was caused by a technical error programmed into the inertial navigation system by the plane’s pilot, according to Korean authorities. Unfortunately, the plane entered Soviet territory over the Kamchatka peninsula where submarines were located and, on the night of the flight, a secret test of an SS-25 Soviet missile reportedly was planned. A U.S. RC-135 spy plane was in the area, and it is assumed the Soviets believed they were destroying the RC-135 or a civilian version of a spy plane. Soviet Colonel Gennadi Osipovich was the pilot given the responsibility of challenging and eventually shooting and destroying Korean Airlines flight 007. Osipovich recalled in a 1996 interview in the New York Times how he pulled alongside the airliner and recognized in the dark the configuration of windows indicating a civilian airliner. He believed this civilian airliner could have a military use and believes to this day, according to the interview, that the plane was on a spy mission. He regrets not shooting the plane down over land so that such proof could be recovered. If Osipovich had waited another twenty to twenty-five seconds to destroy the plane, KAL 007 would have been over neutral territory, which most likely would have averted the incident. A serious U.S.-Soviet diplomatic fallout ensued. See also: KOREA, RELATIONS WITH
TIMOTHY THOMAS
At the 1945 Potsdam Conference, the Western allies acceded to Josef Stalin’s demand that the northern third of East Prussia be awarded to the Soviet Union. He provided two justifications for the transfer of the territory that would be renamed Kaliningrad: The USSR needed an ice-free port on the Baltic Sea, and, through the annexation, the Germans would compensate the Soviet people for the millions of lives they lost at the hands of the Nazi invaders. The American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, said in the Potsdam Protocol that the transfer of territory was contingent upon a final peace treaty; this treaty was never signed by the Allied and Axis powers.
The Prussians, who originally occupied the area, lost their lands after the Teutonic Knights invaded the southern shores of the Baltic littoral in the thirteenth century. By the seventeenth century, the Prussians-cousins to the Latvians and Lithuanians, all of whom spoke a closely related language-disappeared as a nation, and the German invaders henceforth adopted the name “Prussians.”
Russians never lived in East Prussia, although in 1758, during the Seven Years War, Russian troops briefly occupied the capital K?nigsberg and some surrounding territory. After World War I, the German province of East Prussia was created on this territory but was separated from the rest of Germany by the Polish Corridor. Poland was awarded the southern two-thirds of old East Prussia after World War II, and the Soviet Union took control of its northern third, about the size of Northern Ireland. Henceforth most of the German residents fled, or were forced from the area, and their farms and cities were occupied by migrants from other areas of the Soviet Union. Most were Russians and by the mid-1990s this westernmost Russian region had about 930,000 residents. About 80 percent lived in urban areas, the rest in the countryside.
During the Cold War, Kaliningrad was a closed territory with a heavy military presence: The USSR’s Baltic Sea fleet was located there along with contingents of ground and air defense units. It was the first line of defense against an attack from the west and could be used simultaneously for offensive operations in a westward coup de main.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kaliningrad became an “exclave” of the Russian Fed717
KALININ, MIKHAIL IVANOVICH
eration (i.e., a geographical anomaly, since it was a political entity of Russia but surrounded by Lithuania, Poland, and the Baltic Sea). All land and rail routes to and from Kaliningrad to Russia henceforth had to traverse foreign borders.
In the 1990s Kaliningrad was perceived simultaneously as a flash point of conflict with its neighbors and a gateway to Europe. The first perspective was based on the presence of large numbers of Russian troops, and on
