On 1 December 1934, Kirov was shot and killed byLeonid Nikolaev at his offices in theSmolny Institute. Nikolaev and several alleged accomplices were convicted in ashow trial andexecuted less than 30 days later. Kirov's assassination was used by Stalin as a reason for starting theMoscow trials and theGreat Purge.[2]
Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov was born on 27 March [O.S. 15 March] 1886 inUrzhum inVyatka Governorate,Russian Empire, as one of seven children born to Miron Ivanovich Kostrikov and Yekaterina Kuzminichna Kostrikova (née Kazantseva). Their first four children had died young, while Anna (born 1883), Sergei (1886), and Yelizaveta (1889) survived.[3]
Miron, analcoholic, abandoned the family around 1890, and Yekaterina died oftuberculosis in 1893. Sergei and his sisters were raised for a brief time by their paternal grandmother, Melania Avdeyevna Kostrikova, but she could not afford to take care of them all on her small pension of 3rubles per month. Through her connections, Melania succeeded in having Sergey placed in anorphanage at the age of seven, but he saw his sisters and grandmother regularly.[4]
Kirov was a participant in the1905 Russian Revolution and was arrested, joining with theBolsheviks soon after being released from prison. In 1906, he was arrested once again, but this time jailed for over three years, charged with printing illegal literature. Soon after his release, Kirov again took part in revolutionary activity, once again being arrested for printing illegal literature. After a year in custody, Kirov moved to theCaucasus, where he stayed until theabdication of Tsar Nicholas II after theFebruary Revolution in March 1917. By this time, Kirov had shortened his last name from Kostrikov to Kirov, a practice common among Russian revolutionaries of the time. Kirov began using thepen name Kir, first publishing under thepseudonym Kirov on 26 April 1912. One account states that he chose the name Kir, the Russian version ofCyrus (from theGreek Kūros), after aChristian martyr in third-centuryEgypt from anOrthodox calendar of saints' days, andRussifying it by adding an-ovsuffix. A second story is that Kirov based it on the name of the Persian kingCyrus the Great.[6]
Kirov became commander of the Bolshevik military administration inAstrakhan and fought for theRed Army in theRussian Civil War until 1920.Simon Sebag Montefiore writes: "During the Civil War, he was one of the swashbucklingcommissars in the North Caucasus besideOrdzhonikidze andMikoyan. In Astrakhan he enforced Bolshevik power in March 1919 with liberal bloodletting; more than 4,000 were killed. When a bourgeois was caught hiding his own furniture, Kirov ordered him shot."[7]
In 1934, at the17th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Kirov delivered the speech called "The Speech of Comrade Stalin Is the Program of Our Party", which refers to Stalin's speech delivered at the Congress earlier. Kirov praised Stalin for everything he had done since the death of Lenin. Moreover, Kirov personally named and ridiculedNikolai Bukharin,Alexei Rykov, andMikhail Tomsky—former party allies of Stalin. Bukharin and Rykov were later tried in theshow trial calledThe Trial of the Twenty-One accused of Kirov's death, while Tomsky committed suicide expecting his arrest by theNKVD.
A portrait of Kirov from the Sergei Kirov Museum in his former apartment inSaint Petersburg.
After his assassination, Kirov acquired a reputation for having repeatedly stood up to Stalin in private and for becoming so popular that he was a threat to Stalin's supremacy, as he displayed some independence from Stalin.[9] In an alleged example from 1932, Stalin wanted to haveMartemyan Ryutin executed for writing an attack on his leadership but Kirov andSergo Ordzhonikidze talked him out of it.[10]Alexander Orlov, who defected to the West, listed a series of incidents in which Kirov allegedly clashed with Stalin, based on rumours he must have heard from fellowNKVD officers.[11] Kirov's reputed rivalry is a major theme of the historical novelChildren of the Arbat, byAnatoli Rybakov, who wrote:
In his hunger for popularity, Kirov opted for the simple style. He lived onKamennoostrovsky Prospekt in a largehouse, inhabited by all sorts of people, he walked to work, wandered on his own around the streets of the city, took his children for rides in his car and played hide-and-seek with them in the yard ... as if to emphasize that Stalin lived in the Kremlin, with guards, didn't wander the streets or play hide-and-seek with his children, thus underlining the idea that Stalin was afraid of the people, whereas Kirov was not.[12]
At the end of the Communist Party's Seventeenth Congress in February 1934, there is reputed to have been a scandal, when Kirov topped the poll in elections to the Central Committee, and Stalin's acolyte,Lazar Kaganovich ordered a number of ballots be destroyed so that Stalin and Kirov could share top billing.[13]Amy Knight, a historian of the Soviet Union, suggests that whereas Kirov "might have toed the line as others did, on the other hand, he might have acted as a rallying point for those who wanted to oppose his [Stalin's] dictatorship." Furthermore, Knight suggests that Kirov would not have been a willing accomplice when the full force of Stalin's terror was unleashed in Leningrad.[14]
Knight's contention is supported by the fact that whereas most of the elite tried to anticipate what Stalin desired and to act accordingly, Kirov did not always do what Stalin wanted. In 1934, Stalin wanted Kirov to come toMoscow permanently. Whereas all the other members of the Politburo would have complied, Stalin accepted that, as Kirov had no desire to leave Leningrad, he would not come to Moscow until 1938. When Stalin wantedFilipp Medved moved from the Leningrad NKVD toMinsk, Kirov refused to agree; in a rare move for Stalin, he had to accept defeat.[9]
In the first days when Leningrad was orphaned, Stalin rushed there. He went to the place where the crime against our country was committed. The enemy did not fire at Kirov personally. No! He fired at the proletarian revolution.
On the afternoon of Saturday, 1 December 1934, Kirov's assassin,Leonid Nikolayev, arrived at theSmolny Institute offices and made his way to the third floor unopposed, waiting in a hallway until Kirov and his bodyguard Borisov stepped into the corridor. Borisov appeared to have stayed some 20 to 40 paces behind Kirov, with some sources alleging Borisov parted company with Kirov in order to prepare his lunch.[16] Kirov turned a corner and passed Nikolayev, who then drew his revolver and shot Kirov in the back of the neck.[16]
Nikolayev was well known to theNKVD, which had arrested him for variouspetty offences in recent years. Various accounts of his life agree that he was an expelled party member and a failed junior functionary, with a murderous grudge and an indifference to his own survival. Nikolayev was unemployed, with a wife and child, and in financial difficulties. According to Orlov, Nikolayev had allegedly told a friend he wanted to kill the head of the party control commission that had expelled him. Nikolayev's friend reported this to the NKVD.[17]Ivan Zaporozhets then allegedly enlisted Nikolayev's friend to contact him, giving him money and a loaded 7.62 mmNagant M1895 revolver.[17]
Nikolayev's first attempt at killing Kirov failed. On 15 October 1934, Nikolayev packed his Nagant revolver in a briefcase and entered the Smolny Institute where Kirov now worked. Although Nikolayev was initially passed by the main security desk at Smolny, he was arrested after an alert guard asked to examine his briefcase, which was found to contain the revolver.[17] A few hours later, Nikolayev's briefcase and loaded revolver were returned to him, and he was told to leave the building.[18]
With Stalin's approval, the NKVD had previously withdrawn all but four police bodyguards assigned to Kirov. These four guards accompanied Kirov each day to his offices at the Smolny Institute and then left. On 1 December 1934, the usual guard post at the entrance to Kirov's offices was supposedly left unmanned, even though the building housed the chief offices of the Leningrad party apparatus and was the seat of the local government.[17][19] According to some reports, only a single friend, Commissar Borisov, an unarmed bodyguard of Kirov's, remained.[16][19] Given the circumstances of Kirov's death,Alexander Barmine stated that "the negligence of the NKVD in protecting such a high party official was without precedent in the Soviet Union."[18]
Kirov was cremated and his ashes interred in theKremlin Wall necropolis in astate funeral, with Stalin and other prominent members of theCPSU personally carrying hiscoffin. After Kirov's death, Stalin called for swift punishment of the traitors and those found negligent in Kirov's death. Nikolayev was tried alone and secretly byVasili Ulrikh, Chairman of theMilitary Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. He was sentenced to death by shooting on 29 December 1934, and the sentence was carried out that very night. TheSoviet government, led by Stalin, stated that their investigation proved that the assassin was acting on behalf of a secretZinovievist group.[20] The hapless Commissar Borisov died the day after Kirov's assassination, allegedly falling from a moving truck while riding with a group of NKVD agents. According to Orlov, Borisov's wife was committed to aninsane asylum, while Nikolayev's mysterious friend and alleged provocateur, who had supplied him with the revolver and money, was later shot on Stalin's personal orders.[17]
Several NKVD officers from the Leningrad branch were convicted of negligence for not adequately protecting Kirov and sentenced to prison terms of up to ten years. According to Barmine, none of the NKVD officers were executed in the aftermath, and none actually served time in prison. Instead, they were transferred to executive posts in Stalin'sGulag labour camps for a period of time—in effect, a demotion.[18] According toNikita Khrushchev, the same NKVD officers were later shot in 1937.[21]Lajos Magyar, aHungarian communist and refugee from the fall of theHungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, was falsely accused of complicity in Kirov's assassination. Magyar was convicted as a "Zinovievite-Terrorist" and sent to a Gulag, where he died in 1940.
A Communist Partycommuniqué initially reported that Nikolayev had confessed his guilt as an assassin in the pay of a "fascist power," having received money from an unidentified "foreign consul" in Leningrad.[22] The same author claims 104 defendants who were already in prison at the time of Kirov's assassination, and who had no demonstrable connection to Nikolayev, were found guilty of complicity in the "fascist plot" against Kirov, and summarily executed;[22] however, a few days later, during a subsequent Communist Party meeting of the Moscow District, the party secretary announced in a speech that Nikolayev had been personally interrogated by Stalin the day after the assassination, something unheard-of for a party leader such as Stalin to have done. He said: "Comrade Stalin personally directed the investigation of Kirov's assassination. He questioned Nikolayev at length. The leaders of the Opposition placed the gun in Nikolayev's hand!"[23]
Other speakers duly rose to purge the Communist Party of any opposition: "The Central Committee must be pitiless—the Party must be purged... the record of every member must be scrutinized...." No one at the meeting mentioned the initial theory that fascist agents had been responsible for the assassination.[23] Barmine asserts Stalin even used the Kirov assassination to eliminate the remainder of the Opposition leadership, accusingGrigory Zinoviev,Lev Kamenev, Abram Prigozhin, and others who had stood with Kirov in opposing Stalin (or who had simply failed to acquiesce to Stalin's views), of being "morally responsible" for Kirov's murder, and therefore guilty of complicity.[22] Barmine also claimed that Stalin arranged the murder with the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, who armed Nikolayev and sent him to assassinate Kirov.[24]
In hisSecret Speech in 1956, Khrushchev said that the murder of Kirov was organized by NKVD agents who were tasked with protecting Kirov and were eventually shot in 1937.[25] Khrushchev entrustedPyotr Pospelov, Secretary of the Central Committee, to form a commission to investigate the repression of the 1930s; this was the same Pospelov who had drafted the famous Secret Speech for Khrushchev at the20th Congress. Khrushchev stated:
There are reasons for the suspicion that the killer of Kirov, Nikolayev, was assisted by someone from among the people whose duty it was protect the person of Kirov. A month and a half before the killing, Nikolayev was arrested on the grounds of suspicious behavior, but he was released and not even searched. It is an unusually suspicious circumstance that when the Chekist [Borisov] assigned to protect Kirov was being brought for an interrogation, on 2 December 1934, he was killed in a car "accident" in which no other occupants of the car were harmed. After the murder of Kirov, top functionaries of the Leningrad NKVD were relieved of their duties and were given very light sentences, but in 1937 they were shot. We can assume that they were shot in order to cover the traces of the organizers of Kirov's killing.[21]
Pospelov's committee came to the conclusion that Kirov’s murder was facilitated by NKVD officers who were responsible for his security, and that NKVD chiefGenrikh Yagoda was declared a hero, instead of holding him responsible.[26] Pospelov spoke to Dr. Kirchakov and former nurse Trunina, former members of the party, who had been mentioned in a letter by another member of the commission,Olga Shatunovskaya, as having knowledge of the Kirov murder. Kirchakov confirmed that he did talk to Shatunovskaya and Trunina about some of the unexplained aspects of the Kirov murder case and agreed to provide the commission with a written deposition. He stressed that his statement was based on the testimony of one Comrade Yan Olsky, a former NKVD officer who was demoted after Kirov's murder and transferred to the People's Supply System.[26]
In his deposition, Kirchakov wrote that he had discussed Kirov's murder and the role of Fyodor Medved with Olsky. Olsky was of the firm opinion that Medved, Kirov's friend and NKVD security chief of the Leningrad branch, was innocent of the murder. Olsky also told Kirchakov that Medved had been barred from the NKVD Kirov assassination investigation. Instead, the investigation was carried out by a senior NKVD chief,Yakov Agranov, and later by another NKVD bureau officer whose name he did not remember. The other NKVD official may have beenYefim Georgievich Yevdokimov (1891–1939), a Stalin crony, mass-killing specialist, and architect of theShakhty purge trials, who continued to lead a secret police team within the NKVD even after technically retiring from theOGPU in 1931. During one of the committee sessions, Olsky said he was present when Stalin asked Leonid Nikolayev why Comrade Kirov had been killed. To this Nikolayev replied that he carried out the instruction of the "Chekists" (meaning the NKVD) and pointed towards the group of "Chekists" (NKVD officers) standing in the room; Medved was not among them.[27]
Khrushchev's report, "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", was later read at closed-door Party meetings. Afterwards, new material was received by the Pospelov Committee, including the assertion by Kirov's chauffeur, Kuzin, that Commissar Borisov, Kirov's friend and bodyguard, who was responsible for Kirov's round-the-clock security at the Smolny Institute, was intentionally killed, and that his death in a road accident was not an accident at all.[28]
The last attempt in the Soviet Union to review the Kirov murder case was made by the Politburo Commission headed byAlexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev in 1989. After two years of investigations, the working team of the Commission concluded that no materials were found to support Stalin's or NKVD's participation in Kirov's murder.[29] However, Yakovlev himself dissented noticing that a number of circumstances indicated the murder was organized by the NKVD. According toAmy Knight, the Politburo Commission tried to whitewash Stalin.[30]
Kirov's assassination became a major event in the history of the Soviet Union because it was used by Stalin to justifyMoscow trials and his campaign of terror known as theGreat Purge.[31] At the time of Kirov's murder,Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, was out of the country; his daughter Tanya implied that Litvinov realised this event might be an excuse for Stalin to unleash a reign of terror.[32] This view was confirmed by Anastas Mikoyan's son, who stated that the murder of Kirov had certain similarities to theburning of the Reichstag inNazi Germany in 1933. The fire at theReichstag was often said to have been organized by theNazis as a pretext for the mass persecution of the Communists and Social Democrats in Germany. The physical removal of Kirov meant the elimination of a future potential rival for Stalin; the principal objective, as with the fire at the Reichstag, was to manufacture an excuse for repression and control.[33] Based oncircumstantial evidence, a number of historians concluded that the assassination was ordered by Stalin.[34]
According to Orlov, Stalin ordered Yagoda to arrange the assassination of Kirov. Orlov said that Yagoda ordered Medved's deputy, Vania Zaporozhets, to undertake the job. Zaporozhets returned to Leningrad in search of an assassin; in reviewing the files he found the name of Leonid Nikolayev.[17] According to another Soviet defector,Grigori Tokaev, a real oppositionist underground group assassinated Kirov.[35] Author andMenshevik scholarBoris Nikolaevsky argued: "One thing is certain: the only man who profited by the Kirov assassination was Stalin."[36]
The idea of Stalin's complicity in Kirov's assassination has been backed byRobert Conquest andAmy Knight but challenged by revisionist historians who argued that this theory relies primarily oncircumstantial evidence andKhrushchev-era investigations.[37]Robert W. Thurston argued that Kirov was in agreement with Stalin on all major issues and that on the Seventeenth Party Congress, at least 86,5% of voting delegates were in favour of Stalin's membership of the Central Committee; hence, Stalin had little to fear from Kirov. Moreover, nothing in Nikolaev's personal diary indicates that he did not carry out the assassination on his own.[38]
Alla Kirilina andOleg Khlevniuk went as far as to claim that "the conventional narratives are almost entirely myth" because they did not find any orders of assassination in the former Soviet archives.[37]Edvard Radzinsky argued in hisbiography of Stalin that written documents about Stalin ordering the assassination of Kirov were never found simply because they never existed and could not exist. Radzinsky believes that Stalin was behind the assassination, but given the prominent status of Kirov as a Politburo member, it would have been ordered verbally by Stalin to NKVD directorGenrikh Yagoda.[2]
Monument to Kirov inKropyvnytskyi, Ukraine, formerly known as Kirovhrad. The monument was removed in 2014.[40]Bust of Kirov in Enerhetychna street,Kharkiv. It was removed in 2016.
The S. M. Kirov Forestry Academy in Leningrad was named after him but renamed the Saint Petersburg State Forest Technical University.[42] For many years, a huge granite and bronze statue of Kirov dominated the city ofBaku, the capital of Azerbaijan, erected on a hill in 1939. The statue was dismantled in January 1992, shortly after Azerbaijan gained its independence.[43]
Kirov was married to Maria Lvovna Markus (1885–1945) since 1911, although they never formally registered their relationship.Yevgenia Kostrikova (1921–1975), who claimed to be Kirov's daughter, was a famous tank company commander andWorld War II veteran.
^Georges Haupt, and Jean-Jacques Marie (1974).Makers of the Russian Revolution, Biographies of Bolshevik Leaders. (This volume includes a translation of an autobiographical entry written by Kirov for a Soviet encyclopedia in c1925). London: George Allen & Unwin. p. 142.ISBN0-04-947021-3.
^Montefiore, Simon Sebag (2005)Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. Random House. p. 112.ISBN1-4000-7678-1
^Kirov, Sergey (1944).Selected articles and speeches 1918–1934 (Russian). Moscow Russia Valovay 28: OGIZ The State political literature publisher. pp. 106–117,269–289.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
^abHolroyd-Doveton, John (2013).Maxim Litvinov: A Biography. Woodland Publications. p. 406.ISBN9780957296107.
^Yakovlev, A. (28 January 1991) "O dekabr'skoi tragedii 1934",Pravda, p. 3, cited in Getty, J. Archibald (1993) "The Politics of Repression Revisited", in J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning, eds.Stalinist Terror New Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, New York, p. 46.ISBN9780521446709
^Knight, Amy (2017).Orders to Kill: The Putin Regime and Political Murder. St. Martin's Press.ISBN978-1-250-11934-6
^Holroyd-Doveton, John (2013).Maxim Litvinov: A Biography. Woodland Publications. p. 407.ISBN9780957296107.
^Conversation between John Holroyd-Doveton and Tanya, daughter of former Soviet Foreign Secretary Maxim Litvinov
^Yakubov, Vladimir & Worth, Richard (2009). "The Soviet Light Cruisers of theKirov Class". In Jordan, John (ed.).Warship 2009. London: Conway. pp. 82–95.ISBN978-1-84486-089-0.
Biggart, John. "The Astrakhan Rebellion: An Episode in the Career of Sergey Mironovich Kirov",Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 54, no. 2 (April 1976), pp. 231–247.JSTOR4207255.
Conquest, Robert (1989).Stalin and the Kirov Murder. New York: Oxford University Press.ISBN0-19-505579-9.
Linoleum print of Kirov, Narimanov and Orjonikidze by Azerbaijani artist Alakbar Rezaguliyev, AZER.comAzerbaijan International, Vol. 13:4 (Winter 2005), pp. 40-45.
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