The Great Terror

There is little in his past record to suggest that he could have been a major leader. Even if Stalin had dropped dead, the Politburo contained men at least equally forceful, and more experienced, who would not willingly have submitted to Kirov. Pyatakov’s opinion was that if Stalin went, Kaganovich would be able to take over. Even granted the defeat of the entire Stalinist wing, we have no ground for any certainty that Kirov could have coped with his seniors among the “moderates.” But meanwhile, he seems to have presented the most awkward immediate problem from Stalin’s point of view.

Kirov was the best orator the Party had produced since Trotsky. And the concern he had shown, now that the Stalinist victory was complete, for the welfare of the Leningrad workers was beginning to gain him a certain amount of personal popularity. In the Party itself, this popularity was genuine and unqualified. But the most significant thing was the fact that Kirov controlled a definite source of power—the Leningrad organization. When the Leningrad delegates demonstratively led the applause for Kirov at the XVIIth Congress, it may have reminded Stalin of the similar support given by an earlier Leningrad Party generation to Zinoviev.

Throughout Stalin’s career this powerful fief was viewed as a seedbed of rebellion—from his removal of Zinoviev in 1926 to his slaughter of the third generation of Leningrad Communists in 1950. And it is true that in the great northern metropolis, no longer—since 1918—the country’s capital, a certain alienation from the great mass of the hinterland was still present. Russia’s “window on Europe” had always been a sort of advanced outpost. Its citizens thought of themselves as far ahead, even dangerously far, of the rest of the country in civilization and the arts of the West. In this youngest of the great cities of Europe—founded, indeed, after New York, Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia—Kirov was truly showing signs of a certain independence.

It was not easily possibly for Stalin to attack Kirov for deviationism. He had never belonged to the oppositions and had fought them firmly. But he had been generous to them in defeat. The NKVD had already turned up the fact that a number of minor oppositionists or former oppositionists were working quite freely in Leningrad. Officials taxed with permitting this were able to say that Kirov had personally ordered it. In particular, encouraging the cultural life of the city, he had allowed many of them to take posts in publishing and other similar activities. He had also worked in Leningrad in reasonable concord with Party veterans who were not strictly speaking oppositionists, but whose views tended well to the right of the Party line. If he and his Politburo colleagues with similar views had come to power, their standing was scarcely great enough to enable them to rule the Party without appealing to the old oppositionists and effecting a reconciliation with at least the right wing. One could perhaps envision a situation in which Kirov, Ordzhonikidze, and Kuibyshev sat in the Politburo with Bukharin and Pyatakov, and even Kamenev, on a moderate program.

Meanwhile, Kirov had used his position in Leningrad in other ways unwelcome to Moscow. He was in dispute with the Stalinist members of the Politburo on various issues. On the matter of the food supply to the Leningrad workers, he and Stalin had an exchange of sharp words, witnessed by Khrushchev.⁴⁸

Kirov’s election to the Secretariat seems to have been made with a view to his transfer to Moscow, where he would be under Stalin’s eye. In August, Stalin asked Kirov down to Sochi, where he was holidaying with Zhdanov. Here they discussed the proposed transfer, and Stalin eventually had to settle for Kirov’s agreement to come to Moscow “at the end of the second Five-Year Plan”—that is, in 1938. But Stalin clearly believed that the political issues before him must be settled one way or another in the immediate future.⁴⁹

It must have been about this time that Stalin took the most extraordinary decision of his career. It was that the best way of ensuring his political supremacy and dealing with his old comrade—Secretary of the Central Committee, member of the Politburo, First Secretary of the Leningrad Party organization—was murder.

2

THE KIROV MURDER

That many men were undone by not going deep enough in roguery; as in gaming any man may be a loser who doth not play the whole game.

Henry Fielding