Kirov turned right out of the stairwell and passed a dark-haired young man named Leonid Nikolaev, who pressed himself against the wall to let Kirov pass—and then trailed along behind him. Nikolaev pulled out a Nagan revolver and shot Kirov from three feet away in the back of the neck. The bullet passed through his cap. Nikolaev turned the pistol on himself and squeezed the trigger, but an electrician working nearby somehow knocked him down and the second bullet hit the ceiling. Borisov the guard staggered up breathlessly, gun drawn impotently. Kirov fell face down, head turned to the right, his cap’s peak resting on the floor, and still gripping his briefcase—a Bolshevik workaholic to the last.
Several minutes of chaos followed in which witnesses and police ran in every direction, seeing the same events differently and giving conflicting evidence: even the gun was variously seen on the floor and in the assassin’s hand. There seems to be a special sort of miasma in the air at terrible events and this one was no different. What matters is that Kirov lay lifeless on the floor near the unconscious Nikolaev. Kirov’s friend Rosliakov knelt beside him, lifting his head and whispering: “Kirov, Mironich.” They lifted Kirov, with Rosliakov holding his lolling head, on to a conference table, with the blood seeping from his neck leaving a trail of heroic Bolshevik sacrament down the corridor. They loosened his belt and opened his collar. Medved, the Leningrad NKVD boss, arrived but was stopped at the door by Moscow Chekists.
Three doctors arrived, including a Georgian, Dzhanelidze. All declared Kirov dead but they still kept on giving him artificial respiration until almost 5:45 p.m. Doctors in totalitarian states are terrified of eminent dead patients—and with good reason. As the doctors surrendered, those present realized that someone would have to tell Stalin. Everyone remembered where they were when Kirov was assassinated: the Soviet JFK.29
Part Three
ON THE BRINK
1934–1936
12. “I’M ORPHANED”
The Connoisseur of Funerals
Poskrebyshev answered Stalin’s telephone in his office. Kirov’s deputy, Chudov, broke the terrible news from Leningrad. Poskrebyshev tried Stalin’s phone line but he could not get an answer, sending a secretary to find him. The Vozhd, according to his journal, was meeting with Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov and Zhdanov, but hurriedly called Leningrad, insisting on interrogating the Georgian doctor in his native language. Then he rang back to ask what the assassin was wearing. A cap? Were there foreign items on him? Yagoda, who had already called to demand whether any foreign objects had been found on the assassin, arrived at Stalin’s office at 5:50 p.m.
Mikoyan, Sergo and Bukharin arrived quickly. Mikoyan specifically remembered that “Stalin announced that Kirov had been assassinated and on the spot, without any investigation, he said the supporters of Zinoviev [the former leader of Leningrad and the Left opposition to Stalin] had started a terror against the Party.” Sergo and Mikoyan, who were so close to Kirov, were particularly appalled since Sergo had missed seeing his friend for the last time. Kaganovich noticed that Stalin “was shocked at first.”1
Stalin, now showing no emotion, ordered Yenukidze as Secretary of the Central Executive Committee to sign an emergency law that decreed the trial of accused terrorists within ten days and immediate execution without appeal after judgement. Stalin must have drafted it himself. This 1st December Law—or rather the two directives of that night—was the equivalent of Hitler’s Enabling Act because it laid the foundation for a random terror without even the pretence of a rule of law. Within three years, two million people had been sentenced to death or labour camps in its name. Mikoyan said there was no discussion and no objections. As easily as slipping the safety catch on their Mausers, the Politburo clicked into the military emergency mentality of the Civil War.
If there was any opposition, it came from Yenukidze, that unusually benign figure among these amoral toughs, but it was he who ultimately signed it. The newspapers declared the laws were passed by a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee—which probably meant Stalin bullying Yenukidze in a smoky room after the meeting. It is also a mystery why the craven Kalinin, the President who was present, did not sign it. His signature had appeared by the time it was announced in the newspapers. Anyway the Politburo did not officially vote until a few days later.
Stalin immediately decided that he would personally lead a delegation to Leningrad to investigate the murder. Sergo wanted to go but Stalin ordered him to remain behind because of his weak heart. Sergo had indeed collapsed with grief and may have suffered another heart attack. His daughter remembered that “this was the only time he wept openly.” His wife, Zina, travelled to Leningrad to comfort Kirov’s widow.
Kaganovich also wanted to go but Stalin told him that someone had to run the country. He took Molotov, Voroshilov and Zhdanov with him along with Yagoda and Andrei Vyshinsky, the Deputy Procurator, who had crossed Sergo earlier that year. Naturally they were accompanied by a trainload of secret policemen and Stalin’s own myrmidons, Pauker and Vlasik. In retrospect, the most significant man Stalin chose to accompany him was Nikolai Yezhov, head of the CC’s Personnel Department. Yezhov was one of those special young men, like Zhdanov, on whom Stalin was coming to depend.2
The local leaders gathered, shell-shocked, at the station. Stalin played his role, that of a Lancelot heartbroken and angry at the death of a beloved knight, with self-conscious and preplanned Thespianism. When he dismounted from the train, Stalin strode up to Medved, the Leningrad NKVD chief, and slapped his face with his gloved hand.
Stalin immediately headed across town to the hospital to inspect the body, then set up a headquarters in Kirov’s office where he began his own strange investigation, ignoring any evidence that did not point to a terrorist plot by Zinoviev and the Left opposition. Poor Medved, the cheerful Chekist slapped by Stalin, was interrogated first and criticized for not preventing the murder. Then the “small and shabby” murderer himself, Nikolaev, was dragged in. Nikolaev was one of those tragic, simple victims of history, like the Dutchman who lit the Reichstag fire with which this case shares many resemblances. This frail dwarf of thirty had been expelled from, and reinstated in, the Party but had written to Kirov and Stalin complaining of his plight. He was apparently in a daze and did not even recognize Stalin until they showed him a photograph. Falling to his knees before the jackbooted Leader, he sobbed, “What have I done, what have I done?” Khrushchev, who was not in the room, claimed that Nikolaev kneeled and said he had done it on assignment from the Party. A source close to Voroshilov has Nikolaev stammering, “But you yourself told me…” Some accounts claim that he was punched and kicked by the Chekists present.
“Take him away!” ordered Stalin.
The well-informed NKVD defector, Orlov, wrote that Nikolaev pointed at Zaporozhets, Leningrad’s deputy NKVD boss, and said, “Why are you asking me? Ask him.”
Zaporozhets had been imposed on Kirov and Leningrad in 1932, Stalin and Yagoda’s man in Kirov’s fiefdom. The reason to ask Zaporozhets was that Nikolaev had already been detained in October loitering with suspicious intent outside Kirov’s house, carrying a revolver, but had been freed without even being searched. Another time, the bodyguards had prevented him taking a shot. But four years later, when Yagoda was tried, he confessed, in testimony filled with both lies and truths, to having ordered Zaporozhets “not to place any obstacles in the way of the terrorist act against Kirov.”