Born in Elovka,
Krasnoyarsk Krai, in the
Yeniseysk Governorate of the
Russian Empire, he was the son of a wealthy
Jewish merchant. His father was a fur trader. An active participant in the revolutionary movement, at first, an
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
Russian Communist Party (b) 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). ; Kogan is sixth from left Until August 1936, Kogan was the head of the construction of the
Belomorsk Baltic Canal. Measuring and connecting the
Baltic Sea with the
White Sea, the canal was built in 20 months by 170,000 Gulag prisoners. Kogan was a member of the
Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union from 1935 to 1937. He is mentioned from this period by
Aleksandr 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 – –
Zhuk". Kogan was arrested on 31 January 1938. While imprisoned, he wrote several repentance letters to
Nikolay Yezhov, then to
Lavrentiy Beria. He was nonetheless sentenced to death and shot on 3 March 1939 at the NKVD's
Kommunarka shooting ground. He was
rehabilitated in 1956. == Awards ==