Lazar Moiseevich Kaganovich NOTES FROM MEMORY of a Working Class, Communist-Bolshevik, Trade Union, Party and Soviet-State Worker
FORWARD
I began to write my “Notes from Memory” in the 1960s, after I found myself retired -- but, it is true, not immediately.
Some time was needed to recover from the party-political blow that we -- Molotov, Kaganovich, Malenkov and Shepilov -- received in 1957, being expelled from the CC and Politburo, and then expelled from the Party in 1961.
Later, when I begin to discuss 1957-1961, I will speak in more detail about how this injustice was committed by the Khrushchev faction against people who had been Politburo members for many years and who were extremely loyal to Marxism-Leninism.
It is difficult, no, impossible, to describe the painful situation of people who have given their whole lives to the affairs of the working class, to the laboring people, and to the affairs of the Leninist Communist Party and who have found themselves suddenly excluded from the Party.
My personal situation worsened even more, as, to my great sorrow, my wife Maria Markovna, my fighting friend, member of the Party since 1909, with whom I had spent 50 years of family, personal, and Party life, passed on at this time.
But I overcame my situation like a Bolshevik. More than anything, I owe my recovery to my conscious scientific faith in the Great Idea of Socialism and Communism.
This idea is greater, more meaningful, and mightier than personal moments in life, and it is necessary and possible to fight for this idea in any conditions.
To live like before, as I was before the Revolution, as a Proletarian-Bolshevik. That is what I was, and that is what I remain.
I returned to my circle.
As in previous times, I found an audience in the persons of the noble residents of our large apartment building. Residents who were workers, service employees and even members of the intelligentsia gathered around me. They posed many questions to me on various themes. I would answer them willingly and clearly, and then we would simply talk. I was and remain grateful to the people of our apartment building and those around it for their warm and comradely relations to me and to those who surrounded me and cheered me up. Life is only good in the society of people. I again began to feel like a propagandist-agitator for the Party, for Marxism-Leninism, and for Socialism-Communism.
After work, they would approach me in the courtyard, in the entryway or sometimes even at the threshold to my apartment. They loaded me with questions. More than anything, they asked about the history of my work before the Revolution.
I answered them willingly and with pleasure, and this brought me closer to working on my memoirs.
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