The murder of Kirov

On 1 December 1934, shortly after half past four in the afternoon, a revolver shot rang out in a third-floor corridor of the Smolny in Leningrad, the building that housed the party authorities of the city and region. The victim was Sergei Kirov, first secretary of the Leningrad Communist Party organisation, a member of the Politburo and a secretary of the Central Committee, and one of Joseph Stalin’s closest associates. The killer was the thirty-year-old Leonid Nikolaev, a party member who had earlier been expelled from the party and dismissed from his job, and who was detained on the spot, next to his victim’s body. That same day the authorities issued an emergency decree depriving those accused of “terrorism” of the right to a defence and to appeal. Over the following weeks the investigation, directed personally by Stalin, attributed the crime to the former opposition of Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. Kirov’s murder became the starting point for repressions that in 1936–1938 grew into the Great Terror.

Some chronologies state that Kirov was killed by an “unknown assailant”. This is untrue: the killer was known from the first moment, was caught at the scene, and his name was soon published in the newspapers. The dispute that continues to this day concerns something else: whether Nikolaev acted alone, or whether someone helped him or allowed him to act.

Kirov and Leningrad in 1934

Kirov had headed the party in Leningrad since the beginning of 1926. He was sent there to break the power base of Zinoviev, who had ruled the city for several years and had lost the struggle for power with Stalin. Kirov was an effective speaker and a popular leader in the city, but also a hard-line executor of Moscow’s policies: the collectivisation of the countryside, the deportation of the “kulaks” and forced industrialisation, symbolised by the great arms works on the Neva. In July 1930 he joined the Politburo. At the 17th Party Congress in January and February 1934, dubbed the “Congress of Victors”, he gave a speech full of praise for Stalin and became one of the secretaries of the Central Committee. Stalin wanted to bring him to Moscow, but Kirov preferred to stay in Leningrad.

Years later a story arose that at this congress some delegates had urged Kirov to replace Stalin as General Secretary, and that in the secret ballot for the Central Committee Stalin had received far more votes against than Kirov, a fact supposedly covered up. This version, popularised in the time of Nikita Khrushchev, rests on late and unreliable accounts. Historians who have worked in the archives opened after 1991, such as Oleg Khlevniuk, have found no trace of political rivalry between Kirov and Stalin. The two were friends: as late as August 1934 Kirov spent a holiday on the Black Sea with Stalin and Andrei Zhdanov.

The shot in the Smolny

Leonid Nikolaev was born in St Petersburg in 1904. He was short and sickly, and for years had been unable to hold down any job. In 1934 he was working at the Leningrad Institute of Party History. When he refused a transfer to other work he was expelled from the party; on appeal he was reinstated with a reprimand, but he did not get his post back. He was unemployed, had a family to support and blamed the party bureaucracy for his failures. In a diary he had kept for months, declassified only in 2009, he wrote that he intended to commit a deed that would go down in history, and compared himself to Andrei Zhelyabov, the assassin of Tsar Alexander II. He owned a Nagant revolver, for which he held a permit. His wife, Milda Draule, a Latvian, had previously worked in the party apparatus at the Smolny. Rumours of an affair between her and Kirov circulated in Leningrad but were never confirmed.

On 15 October 1934 security guards detained Nikolaev near Kirov. After he showed his party card and gun permit, he was released. On 1 December he entered the Smolny on a party pass and waited in the corridor near Kirov’s office. As the secretary walked past him, Nikolaev shot him in the back of the head. Kirov died instantly. The killer tried to shoot himself with the same revolver but missed and lost consciousness. He was taken to hospital in a state of shock, and his interrogation began that evening.

No bodyguard was with Kirov at that moment. His personal NKVD guard, Mikhail Borisov, had fallen several dozen paces behind. The next day, 2 December, Borisov was killed in an NKVD lorry that was taking him to be questioned and that crashed into the wall of a building. The death of the only witness who could have explained the gaps in security immediately seemed suspicious.

The decree of 1 December

Still on 1 December, on Stalin’s initiative and without a formal decision of the Politburo, the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR issued a resolution signed by Mikhail Kalinin and Avel Yenukidze. Investigations into cases of preparing or committing terrorist acts were to last no more than ten days; the indictment was to be handed to the accused twenty-four hours before the trial; cases were to be heard without the parties, that is without defence counsel or prosecutor; there was to be no appeal or petition for clemency; and death sentences were to be carried out immediately after they were pronounced. The Politburo approved the decree two days later.

The so-called law of 1 December remained in force for years. It was under this law, by summary procedure and without defence, that the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR sentenced tens of thousands of people in 1937–1938. Its first victims were “White Guards” who had been arrested in Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev even before the assassination: in the first days of December 1934 they were shot as supposed terrorists – about a hundred of them, according to various sources.

The investigation: “Look among the Zinovievites”

On 2 December Stalin arrived in Leningrad by train with Vyacheslav Molotov, Kliment Voroshilov, Zhdanov, the head of the NKVD Genrikh Yagoda and the head of the Central Committee’s personnel department, Nikolai Yezhov. Stalin personally interrogated Nikolaev in the Smolny. The head of the Leningrad NKVD, Filipp Medved, was removed from the investigation, which was conducted by Yagoda’s deputy, Yakov Agranov.

At first the investigators pursued the lead of a “White Guard” conspiracy and foreign intelligence services. After a few days Stalin pointed them in a different direction. Yezhov recalled at a plenum of the Central Committee in 1937 that Stalin had summoned him and said: “Look for the killers among the Zinovievites.” The NKVD officers, he added, did not believe it. Within a few weeks dozens of former supporters of Zinoviev, with whom Nikolaev had had passing acquaintances years before, were arrested in Leningrad. On 16 December Zinoviev and Kamenev themselves were detained in Moscow. Material hastily put together by Yezhov was supposed to prove that an underground “Leningrad centre” was behind the assassination.

Trials and deportations

On 28 and 29 December 1934 a visiting session of the Military Collegium, presided over by Vasily Ulrikh, tried Nikolaev and thirteen other defendants in Leningrad, most of them former Komsomol activists from the Zinovievite opposition. Most pleaded not guilty. Nikolaev confirmed his statements only when questioned by Ulrikh in the absence of his co-defendants. At 5.45 a.m. on 29 December all fourteen were sentenced to death, and an hour later they were shot. According to a guard’s account, Nikolaev shouted after the verdict was read: “They deceived me!” His wife was shot in March 1935, and repression fell on his mother, his siblings and other relatives.

On 15 and 16 January 1935 the so-called “Moscow centre” was tried in Moscow: nineteen defendants headed by Zinoviev and Kamenev. They were not yet charged with direct involvement in the murder, but with “moral and political responsibility” for it. Zinoviev received ten years in prison, Kamenev five. On 18 January the Central Committee sent party organisations a closed letter on the “lessons” of Kirov’s murder, calling for vigilance towards former oppositionists. A campaign of checking party cards and of expulsions, led by Yezhov, began in the party.

Twelve officers of the Leningrad NKVD, headed by Medved and his deputy Ivan Zaporozhets, were sentenced in January 1935 to between two and ten years in the camps for negligence. The sentences were surprisingly lenient, and those convicted went on to hold posts in the camp administration. In 1937–1938 almost all of them were shot.

Leningrad paid a particularly high price for Kirov’s death. In the spring of 1935 more than 11,000 “former people” – erstwhile aristocrats, officers, tsarist officials, clergy and their families – were deported from the city to Kazakhstan and Siberia. The operation was called the “Kirov flood”. After Kirov, Zhdanov took over the Leningrad party organisation.

Who was behind Nikolaev?

Doubts arose as early as 1934. How was it possible that an armed man, detained near Kirov a few weeks earlier, could enter the Smolny and wait outside the office of one of the most important men in the state? Why was the bodyguard Borisov killed, and why were the NKVD officers responsible punished so lightly? NKVD defectors such as Alexander Orlov claimed that Stalin had ordered the killing and that Yagoda had instructed Zaporozhets to prepare it. In his secret speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” of February 1956, Khrushchev spoke of “many unexplained circumstances” and suggested that someone from Kirov’s security detail had helped Nikolaev. The version in which Stalin was involved was adopted in their books by Robert Conquest and Amy Knight.

Commissions set up in the USSR in 1956–1961 and again in 1989–1990 found no evidence that Stalin or the NKVD had ordered the murder. In 1990 the USSR Prosecutor’s Office concluded that Nikolaev had acted alone, but that NKVD investigators had artificially linked him with former Zinovievites and fabricated cases against them. Olga Shatunovskaya, a member of Khrushchev’s commission, maintained to the end of her life, however, that documents incriminating Stalin had disappeared from the files. Some present-day researchers who rely on Nikolaev’s diaries and statements – such as Alla Kirilina, Oleg Khlevniuk and Matthew Lenoe, author of the most comprehensive monograph on the case – consider it most likely that the killer was a frustrated loner. Others, such as Amy Knight, uphold the thesis that the deed was inspired from above. No document has settled the dispute.

What is certain, however, is how Stalin made use of the crime. From the very first hours the murder was treated as the act of a hostile conspiracy, and within a few weeks it had been attributed to former political opponents, although there was no evidence whatsoever for this. Many contemporaries and historians have compared Kirov’s death with the Reichstag fire of February 1933: regardless of who set the fire and who pulled the trigger, both events served dictators as a pretext for removing the last restraints in the struggle against real and imagined enemies. Only half a year earlier, during the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler had shown that a head of government could have his opponents killed and proclaim it an act of the state’s self-defence.

Significance

Kirov was buried in the Kremlin Wall on 6 December 1934, in the presence of the entire party leadership headed by Stalin. Towns were named after him, among them the former Vyatka, as were the Mariinsky Theatre and the former Putilov Works. Yet the cult of the murdered “favourite of the party” served above all to point the finger at his supposed killers.

The logic set in motion on 1 December 1934 led straight to the Great Terror. Zinoviev and Kamenev, sentenced in 1935 for “moral responsibility”, were put on trial in August 1936 as the organisers of the assassination and shot. Each successive show trial added new people to the conspiracy: Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin and finally Yagoda himself, who in 1938 “confessed” to having organised the murder. The decree of 1 December became an instrument of mass executions, and Yezhov, who had made his career on the Kirov investigation, became head of the NKVD in September 1936.

In 1937–1938 some 680,000 people died at the hands of the NKVD, among them most of the Old Bolsheviks and a large part of the Red Army’s high command. The same Soviet Union that in 1934 had only just joined the League of Nations and was seeking an understanding with France against Hitler was a few years later a state in which no one dared oppose the will of one man. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 and the Red Army’s defeats in 1941 also have their roots in what began with the shot in the Smolny.