Anatol Kagan 1913 to 2009

Anatol Kagan died this month aged 95. A modernist architect resident in Melbourne in the '40s and '50s, he had been living in Sydney since the early Sixties.

At the age of 4, he remembers the panic during the Bolshevik Revolution, the epicentre of which was in his Moscow neighbourhood. The Russian Jewish Kagan family quickly moved to Berlin, where Anatol studied architecture and converted to Trotskyism at the age of 17. In 1938 the family fled Nazi germany to Melbourne via London.

According to The Age, for 40 years Kagan was an active member of both the Labour and Greens parties, and received messages of condolence from Rudd, Hawke, and Keating.

Kagan never gave up on his dream of a better world. Right to the end this gentle Marxist democrat attended his Labor Party branch meetings armed with resolutions or his latest letter to the prime minister about the need for genuine action to tackle the climate crisis.

His obituary at The Age is worth a read for more on his architectural career.