Departing his office that night of December 5 at 10:00, Stalin arrived at the House of Trade Unions for a final farewell as the Bolshoi Orchestra played Chopin’s funeral march. He evidently kissed the dead Kirov on the lips and stated, “Farewell, dear friend.”120 The body was taken to be cremated. Back at the Kremlin, Shumyatsky showed Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, Orjonikidze, Mikoyan, Kaganovich, and Zhdanov clips from a documentary by Yakov Bliokh of Kirov’s life and death. “Koba especially tensely watched those parts depicting the deceased Kirov in motion,” Shumyatsky noted, using Stalin’s nickname. “When they showed the episodes of the population reading the sad news, everyone noted that the reaction to the event was depicted powerfully and clearly. . . . Koba and the others watched especially tensely the parts in Leningrad—in the Tauride Palace, at the casket, and the accompanying of the casket with the body to the train station.” It was silent footage, but Shumyatsky had also brought film of two of Kirov’s speeches. Stalin liked Kirov’s speech at the last Leningrad provincial party conference, where he had spoken about Marxist-Leninist education.121
On Red Square the next day, a full military funeral took place. A devastated Orjonikidze was afforded the honor of interring the urn in the Kremlin Wall. Stalin also allowed Orjonikidze’s signature to be placed second under Kirov’s obituary in Pravda, after the dictator’s, out of the usual hierarchy.122 Molotov delivered a eulogy (Stalin complimented him on it). Stalin had the orchestra play a Kirov favorite, Shatrov’s “On the Hills of Manchuria,” which dated to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5: “The crosses for magnificent bygone heroes show their whiteness, and the shades of the past circle about, hardening us about those who fell in vain. . . . But believe me, we will avenge you and celebrate a bloody funeral feast.”123 Pravda that morning (December 6) had already announced that seventy persons were being tried in other cases on charges of “preparing terrorist actions against Soviet authorities.” The inner circle repaired to Stalin’s apartment in the Imperial Senate for a luncheon. The dictator, full of grief, according to Artyom, said Kirov had been an optimist, a lover of life, so if anyone was to cry, to “let out snot,” they would be dishonoring his memory. He played songs on the gramophone Kirov loved. “Everyone there was in a crushed mood.” Stalin requested that they watch the Kirov documentary footage again and invited Vasily and Svetlana, calling her the Mistress of the House and asking her to direct the viewing. Stalin again reminded Shumyatsky to insert footage of the liveliness of the streets and squares as Kirov’s casket was brought to the capital. Postyshev said Shumyatsky needed to include a speech by Stalin, whose voice had not yet appeared in sound footage. “Film is a powerful instrument for propaganda and agitation,” Stalin intoned. Then they watched Chapayev until 1:00 a.m.124
Unlike the pioneer Mussolini, the Soviet dictator chose not to speak directly on radio. The twenty-year-old Yuri Levitan had become Stalin’s voice from around the time of the 17th Party Congress, when he had read the five-hour congress speech over the radio. On December 6, 1934, Levitan was on the air when Kirov’s ashes were interred in the Kremlin Walclass="underline" “Farewell, pupil of Lenin and friend of Stalin, leader of the Leningrad proletariat, farewell!”125 That night, after the film screening, Pavel Alliluyev stayed at the Near Dacha to keep an eye on his brother-in-law. “I’m an utter orphan,” the dictator supposedly told him, putting his head in his hands. Stalin also said Kirov had looked after him as one does for a child.126
THE INVESTIGATION
At Stalin’s suggestion, to get Nikolayev to admit complicity in a “group,” he was plied with food, cigarettes, and the usual promises to spare his own and his family members’ lives. Interrogators lied that Milda had not (yet) been arrested. Agranov and his team were making suggestions to him about “ties,” and Nikolayev began to go along, admitting that he did belong to a “group.” He also tried to jump out the window. The interrogators were now interested in his acquaintances Ivan Kotolynov and Nikolai Shatsky, both at one time expelled from the party and figures in Nikolayev’s notebook/diary. Kotolynov was being called a Trotskyite, but, as it happened, he and others had been Communist Youth League functionaries when Zinoviev was party boss.127 Voilà. The names of Zinoviev as well as Kamenev started to crop up in the interrogation protocols, which Agranov was forwarding to Stalin.128 (In the Kirov case, the dictator would receive at least 260 interrogation protocols, a new genre of belles lettres.)129
The NKVD drafted a scenario, which Stalin edited, of parallel terrorist organizations, a “Leningrad Center” and a “Moscow Center.” None of this had been part of the interrogations before December 4, 1934, when Stalin had summoned a large group to his office, including prosecutors, court officials, secret police operatives, and Agranov, who came from Leningrad.130 During discussions over the next several days, Stalin shifted Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Leningrad to the guiding Moscow Center. The Leningrad Center was now said to be led by Nikolayev, Kotolynov, and their associates.131
Amid a mood for bloodthirsty revenge, the ethnic Pole party boss of Ukraine, Kosior, wanted to respond to the assassination with directives for mass relocations of Soviet ethnic Poles from the frontier. But a calculating Stalin softened a secret circular sent by party channels (December 7, 1934) to both Ukraine and Belorussia regarding their ethnic Polish border populations, evidently to avoid complications in Soviet-Polish and Soviet-German relations. By contrast, in response to a plan to deport 5,000 “socially alien” families from the Karelian autonomous republic and Leningrad province—both near the Finnish border, where geopolitical complications were largely absent—Stalin wrote, “Why not more?”132
On December 9, after meetings in his office with the prosecutors, judges, and NKVD officials, among many others, until 7:30 p.m., Stalin suppered one floor below at his Kremlin apartment with Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Orjonikidze, and Molotov, a practice that was becoming increasingly routine. The relatives had come over on the pretext of giving Svetlana, said to be distraught over Kirov’s death, some gifts to cheer her up. “It broke my heart to look at him,” Maria Svanidze wrote in her diary of Stalin at the table. “He is suffering greatly.”133
In Leningrad, fourteen people—all save Shatsky—testified that they had participated in an underground Zinovievite “group,” but all denied complicity in the assassination except Nikolayev. Interrogators had tried to get him to admit that his working-class father had hired laborers, making him the offspring of a class alien, but he refused. Nonetheless, Nikolayev, a working-class Communist of conviction—precisely why he had killed Kirov—somehow had to be turned into a “class enemy.” Over time, the wily Agranov seems to have persuaded him that he could realize one more great deed: the destruction of the Zinovievites. Nikolayev apparently would not fully realize until later that this task on behalf of the cause required retrospectively making him a member of the 1920s Zinoviev opposition.
Accused Zinovievites were arrested in waves, and one turned out to be hiding the archives of the Zinoviev opposition. (All told, 843 “former Zinovievites” would be arrested by the NKVD in the ten weeks after the murder; thousands would be exiled administratively.) The few core genuine supporters of Zinoviev did not hide their critical feelings toward Stalin and his policies: they believed, for example, that Hitler’s rise in Germany had resulted from Comintern passivity.134 They also freely admitted that they occasionally met and discussed these views. And so it was “an organization” and “anti-party.” They were also found to have copies of Lenin’s Testament and the Ryutin appeal calling for Stalin’s removal, and almost every one of them turned out to have a gun at home, sometimes more than one, usually acquired and held legally since civil war days. And so it was “terrorism,” too.