'Death from Natural Causes'

A longtime reader who is an attorney living in Dallas periodically sends me vintage postcards, usually with hand-tinted scenes of life in Texas. The latest shows Main Street in downtown Houston. The street is clogged with 1940’s-era automobiles and the sidewalks are packed shoulder-to-shoulder with shoppers. Visible on the right is the S.H. Kress and Co. Building, built in 1913 and now on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. Beyond it is the Woolworth building, torn down in 1980. The photo’s caption reads: “Houston – Fastest Growing City in the United States.” On the address side of the card is a capsule history of the city, which concludes: “Population 1940 census 387,000.” Houston's estimated population in 2016 was 2.3 million.

My reader’s handwritten messages tend to be gnomically witty. In this case, he quotes a sentence from Yale historian Laura Engelstein’s Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (2017): “Voroshilov, always close to Stalin, went on to a long career in Soviet military and political life, his major accomplishment being death from natural causes.” Anyone familiar with Stalin’s management style will get the joke. The person in question is Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov (1881-1969), who outlived his former boss by sixteen years and was retained in power by Khrushchev. In 1950 he was named Chairman of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet. He was the definition of an apparatchik, less a military man than a dedicated bureaucrat and careerist. Every thuggish government relies on such people.

Twice Voroshilov was awarded the title “Hero of the Soviet Union.” In 1960 he received the Gold Star of “Hero of Socialist Labor.” General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev returned Voroshilov to the Central Party Committee. He died at age eighty-seven. The city of Lugansk was renamed Voroshilovgrad. Elsewhere in Russia in Flames, Engelstein writes that “there were no halcyon days of the Bolshevik Revolution. There was no primal moment of democratic purity that was later betrayed […] The Bolsheviks were ruthless and uncompromising from Day One.”