The Great Terror

Late in the afternoon of 1 December 1934, the young assassin Leonid Nikolayev entered the Smolny, headquarters of the Communist Party in Leningrad. The few hours of the city’s thin winter daylight were over, and it was quite dark. The lights of the former aristocratic girls’ school, from which Lenin had organized the “ten days that shook the world,” shone out over its colonnade and gardens, and eastward up the icy Neva. The outer guard examined Nikolayev’s pass, which was in order, and let him in without trouble. In the interior, the guard posts were unmanned, and Nikolayev wandered down the ornate passages until he found the third-floor corridor on to which Sergei Kirov’s office opened. He waited patiently outside.

Kirov was at home preparing a report on the November plenum of the Central Committee, from which he had just returned. He was to deliver it to the aktiv of the Leningrad Party in the Tavride Palace that evening, and was not expected at the Smolny. However, he arrived there at about 4:00 P.M., and after speaking to his trusted aide, Leningrad’s Second Secretary Mikhail Chudov, and others, he walked on towards his own office just after 4:30.

¹ Nikolayev moved from a corner, shot him in the back with a Nagan revolver, and then collapsed beside him.

At the sound of the shot, Party officials came running along the corridor. They were astonished at the absence of guards. Even Kirov’s chief bodyguard, Borisov, who according to standing instructions should have been with him, was nowhere to be seen, though he had accompanied Kirov as far as the Smolny’s front door.

This killing has every right to be called the crime of the century. Over the next four years, hundreds of Soviet citizens, including the most prominent political leaders of the Revolution, were shot for direct responsibility for the assassination, and literally millions of others went to their deaths for complicity in one or another part of the vast conspiracy which allegedly lay behind it. Kirov’s death, in fact, was the keystone of the entire edifice of terror and suffering by which Stalin secured his grip on the Soviet peoples.

For a full account, based on the current state of our knowledge, readers are referred to my Stalin and the Kirov Murder, published early in 1989. The new information available since I wrote of the murder in The Great Terror validates the story then given in all points of substance, and I have had to amend it, there and here, only as to certain details.

Fairly sound accounts of the murder had been available in the West for many years. They lacked confirmation—indeed, they were hotly rejected—by Soviet sources. No full story of the Kirov murder has even now appeared in the Soviet Union; but strong hints have been given, details have been confirmed or amended, and statements have appeared which are incompatible with any version but the one long since published in the West by certain of Stalin’s enemies, and often previously rejected even here as coming from biased sources and, in any case, being beyond reasonable belief.

The truth is, indeed, beyond reasonable belief.

The first official Soviet line, accepted by many in the West, was that Nikolayev was a Zinovievite indirectly inspired by Zinoviev and Kamenev. Then, in 1936, the fallen leaders were accused of being directly involved, of having ordered the killing. Finally, in 1938, the Soviet view took the form it was to keep until 1956: Zinoviev and Kamenev, together with Trotsky, had ordered the assassination. It had been facilitated by Yagoda, head of the NKVD, who, as a Rightist under Yenukidze’s instructions, had ordered Zaporozhets the second-in-command of the Leningrad NKVD—to remove all obstacles to the assassin.

This change of line, which contained elements of truth, was evidently designed to mask or neutralize the real version, which began to circulate in the NKVD within weeks of the crime—that Nikolayev was an individual assassin, and Stalin had arranged his opportunity. There is no real doubt that it is the correct explanation; we can now reconstruct the details.

The problem Stalin faced in 1934 admitted of no political solution entirely satisfactory to him. But he saw one way out. It was extremely unorthodox. It shows more clearly than anything else the completeness of his lack of moral or other inhibitions. To kill Kirov would remove the immediate obstacle, and at the same time create an atmosphere of violence in which the enemies on to whom he shifted the blame for the murder could be wiped out without the sort of arguments he had encountered over Ryutin.