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
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.
Stalin seems to have been impressed by the 30 June 1934 Purge in Nazi Germany. But he did not himself proceed in the same way. The one principle firmly established in the Nazi Party, that the will of the leader is the highest law, had no equivalent in the Communist Party. Even when, later on, Stalin was in practice able to destroy his critics at least as freely as Hitler, it was always either done in the form of some sort of trial accompanied by some sort of justification or carried out in complete secrecy. The only case in which Stalin struck with a simulacrum of the urgency of Hitler’s June Purge was when he destroyed the generals in June 1937. It is true that Hitler really had some fear of Roehm and the S.A. as a rival power center, against which no other method could be risked, and something of the same sort of argument seemed at least plausible as regards the Soviet High Command. (Stalin could have learned another point from Hitler’s June Purge, though there is no reason to suppose him incapable of discovering the same tactics for himself. When destroying one group of enemies, it is helpful to throw in, and accuse of the same plot, a variety of other hostile figures in no way connected with them.)fn1