After Kirov's assassination, he 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. He did display some independence from Stalin.
[10]
Allegedly, in 1932, Stalin wanted to have
Martemyan Ryutin
executed for writing an attack on his leadership, but Kirov and
Sergo Ordzhonikidze
talked him out of it.
[11]
Alexander Orlov
, who defected to the West, listed a series of incidents in which Kirov allegedly clashed with Stalin, based on rumors he must have heard from fellow
NKVD
officers.
[12]
Kirov's reputed rivalry is a major theme of the historical novel
Children of the Arbat
, by
Anatoli Rybakov
, who wrote:
In his hunger for popularity, Kirov opted for the simple style. He lived on
Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt
in a large
house
, 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.
[13]
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.
[14]
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." Further, Knight suggests that Kirov would not have been a willing accomplice when the full force of Stalin's terror was unleashed in Leningrad.
[15]
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 to
Moscow
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. Again, when Stalin wanted
Filipp Medved
moved from the Leningrad NKVD to
Minsk
, Kirov refused to agree and, rarely for Stalin, he had to accept defeat.
[10]
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.
?
Pravda
, 5 December 1934
[16]
On the afternoon of Saturday, 1 December 1934, Kirov's assassin,
Leonid Nikolayev
, arrived at the
Smolny 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.
[17]
Kirov turned a corner and passed Nikolayev, who then drew his revolver and shot Kirov in the back of the neck.
[17]
Nikolayev was well known to the
NKVD
, which had arrested him for various
petty 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.
[18]
Zaporozhets
then allegedly enlisted Nikolayev's "friend" to contact him, giving him money and a loaded 7.62?mm
Nagant M1895
revolver.
[18]
However, 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.
[18]
A few hours later, Nikolayev's briefcase and loaded revolver were returned to him, and he was told to leave the building.
[19]
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.
[18]
[20]
According to some reports, only a single friend, Commissar Borisov, an unarmed bodyguard of Kirov's, remained.
[20]
[17]
Given the circumstances of Kirov's death, a historian
Alexander Barmine
stated that "the negligence of the NKVD in protecting such a high party official was without precedent in the Soviet Union."
[19]
Kirov was cremated and his ashes interred in the
Kremlin Wall necropolis
in a
state funeral
, with Stalin and other prominent members of the
CPSU
personally carrying his
coffin
.
Aftermath
edit
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 by
Vasili Ulrikh
, Chairman of the
Military 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. The
Soviet government
, led by Stalin, stated that their investigation proved that the assassin was acting on behalf of a secret
Zinovievist
group.
[21]
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 an
insane 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.
[18]
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's
Gulag
labour camps for a period of time?in effect, a demotion.
[19]
According to
Nikita Khrushchev
, the same NKVD officers were later shot in 1937.
[22]
Lajos Magyar
, a
Hungarian
communist and refugee from the fall of the
Hungarian 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 Party
communique
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.
[23]
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.
[23]
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:
[24]
"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!
[24]
"
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.
[24]
Barmine asserts Stalin even used the Kirov assassination to eliminate the remainder of the Opposition leadership, accusing
Grigory 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.
[23]
Barmine also claimed that Stalin arranged the murder with the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, who armed Nikolayev and sent him to assassinate Kirov.
[25]
Investigations by Soviet authorities
edit
Nikita Khrushchev, in his
Secret Speech
in 1956, said that the murder of Kirov was organized by NKVD agents who were tasked with protecting Kirov and were eventually shot in 1937.
[26]
Khrushchev entrusted
Pyotr 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 the
20th 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.
[22]
Pospelov committee came to conclusion that Kirov’s murder was facilitated by NKVD officers who were responsible for his security, and that NKVD chief
Genrikh Yagoda
was declared a hero, instead of holding him responsible.
[27]
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.
[27]
In his deposition, Kirchakov wrote that he had discussed the 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 been
Yefim Georgievich Yevdokimov
(1891?1939), a Stalin crony, mass-killing specialist, and architect of the
Shakhty purge trials
, who continued to lead a secret police team within the NKVD even after technically retiring from the
OGPU
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.
[28]
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.
[29]
The last attempt in the Soviet Union to review the Kirov murder case was made by the Politburo Commission headed by
Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev
in 1989. After two years of investigations, the working team of the Commission concluded that no materials were found to support the Stalin's or NKVD participation of Kirov's murder.
[30]
Significance and responsibility
edit
Kirov's assassination became a major event in the history of the Soviet Union because it was used by Stalin to justify
Moscow trials
and his campaign of terror known as the
Great 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 the
burning of the Reichstag
in
Nazi Germany
in 1933. The fire at the
Reichstag
was organized by the
Nazis
as a pretext for the mass persecution of the Communists and Social Democrats in Germany. The physical removal of Kirov meant elimination of a future potential rival for Stalin, but the principal objective, as with the fire at the Reichstag, was to manufacture an excuse for repression and control.
[33]
According to
Alexander Orlov
, a Soviet defector to the
United States
, Stalin then 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.
[18]
According to another Soviet defector,
Grigori Tokaev
, a real oppositionist underground group assassinated Kirov.
[34]
Author and
Menshevik
scholar
Boris Nikolaevsky
argued: "One thing is certain: the only man who profited by the Kirov assassination was Stalin."
[35]
The idea of Stalin's complicity in Kirov's assassination has been backed by
Robert Conquest
and
Amy Knight
, but challenged by revisionist historians who argued that this theory relies primarily on
circumstantial evidence
and
Khrushchev-era
investigations.
[36]
Alla Kirilina and
Oleg Khlevniuk
, who did not find any orders of assassination in the former Soviet archives, went as far as to claim that "the conventional narratives are almost entirely myth".
[36]
Edvard Radzinsky
in his
biography of Stalin
explained that written documents about Stalin ordering the assassination of Kirov were never found simply because they never existed and could not exist. Given the very high status of Kirov as a Politburo member, the order would have to be given verbally by Stalin to NKVD director
Genrikh Yagoda
, and that is what he apparently did.
[2]
Many cities, streets and factories were named or renamed after Kirov in Russia, including the cities of
Kirov
(formerly Vyatka) and
Kirov Oblast
,
Kirovsk
(
Murmansk Oblast
),
Kirov
(
Kaluga Oblast
),
Kirovohrad
(formerly Zinovyevsk, now Kropyvnytskyi
[37]
) and
Kirovohrad Oblast
(
Ukrainian SSR
; now
Ukraine
),
Kirovabad
(
Azerbaijani SSR
; now Ganja,
Azerbaijan
),
Kirovakan
(
Armenian SSR
; now Vanadzor,
Armenia
), the
Kirovskaya
station of the
Moscow Metro
(now Chistye Prudy station), the
Kirov Ballet
(now the Mariinsky Ballet), the massive
Kirov Plant
in Saint Petersburg,
Kirov Square
in
Yekaterinburg
, the
Kirov Islands
in the
Kara Sea
, and various small settlements.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of the locations and buildings named after Kirov have been renamed, especially outside of
Russia
. In order to comply with
Ukrainian decommunization laws
, Kirovohrad was renamed Kropyvnytskyi by the
Ukrainian parliament
on 14 July 2016.
[37]
In 2019, the
Constitutional Court of Ukraine
approved the change of the oblast's name to Kropyvnytskyi Oblast, or Kropyvnychchyna.
[39]
The S. M. Kirov Forestry Academy in Leningrad was named after him but renamed the Saint Petersburg State Forest Technical University.
[40]
For many years, a huge granite and bronze statue of Kirov dominated the city of
Baku
, the capital of Azerbaijan, erected on a hill in 1939. The statue was dismantled in January 1992, shortly after Azerbaijan gained its independence.
[41]
The Kirov Prize, a
speedskating
match in the city of Kirov, was named for him. The Kirov Prize is the oldest annual organised race in speedskating, apart from the
World Speed Skating Championships
and the
European Speed Skating Championships
.
The English communist poet
John Cornford
wrote an eponymous poem in his honour.
[42]
The
Soviet Navy
cruiser
Kirov
was named after him, and by extension the
Kirov
-class cruiser
.
[43]
The
Kirov
name was again used for the battlecruiser
Kirov
and the
Kirov
-class battlecruiser
.
The
Khai-3
tailless airplane
was also named after him.