Lazar Kogan

Lazar Iosifovich Kogan (Russian: Ла́зарь Ио́сифович Ко́ган) (1889—March 3, 1939) was a Soviet secret police (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD) high functionary. He was the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant. His father was a fur trader.

An active participant in the revolutionary movement, anarcho-communist. In 1908, a Kiev military district court sentenced him to death for participating in looting with a gun in his hand. This punishment was then converted into a life sentence.

Kogan joined the Communist Party in 1918.

His major positions include chief of the GULAG (1930-1932), deputy chief of the GULAG (1932-1936), deputy Narkom of Forest Industry (1936-1937).

Until August 1936, the head of the construction of the Belomorsk Baltic Canal measuring 227 kilometers and connecting the Baltic Sea with the White Sea built in 20 months by 170,000 Gulag prisoners.

He is mentioned from this period by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the "Gulag Archipelago": "It is time to put six names on the slopes of this channel - the main helpers of Stalin and Yagoda, the main supervisors of Belomor canal, six mercenary killers, after each of them thirty thousand deaths victims: Firin - Berman - Frenkel - Kogan - Rappaport - Zhuk ".

He was awarded the Order of Lenin (1933) and the Order of the Red Banner. Member of the CEC of the USSR in 1935-1937.

He was arrested on 31 January 1938. While imprisoned, he wrote several repentance letters to Yezhov, then to Beria. He was nonetheless sentenced to death and shot on 3 March 1939. He was rehabilitated in 1956.