The details of Kirov’s party career offer scant evidence that he enjoyed an independent political position and much to suggest that he did not. Like other Politburo members in the 1930s, Kirov was a Stalin man. His initiatives were confined to the needs of Leningrad—requests for such items as new capital investment and resources or for the opening of new stores. He rarely came to Moscow to attend Politburo meetings or participated in voting on Politburo resolutions or the polling of its members. Not only was Kirov not a reformer, but the available documents do not even show that he took any serious part in developing or implementing high-level political decisions. He was Stalin’s faithful comrade-in-arms and remained so to the end. Within the party he was never regarded as a political leader on a par with Stalin, and he did not promote any political programs that differed from Stalin’s.
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His death had an incomparably greater effect on the country’s development than his life. As often happens, it was his death that turned Kirov into a legend.
THE MURDER
Kirov was killed on 1 December 1934 in Leningrad’s Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny Institute, a neoclassical building that formerly housed Russia’s first educational institution for girls. In the seven decades between the 1918 attempt on Lenin’s life and the end of the Soviet regime, this was the only successful assassination attempt against a senior Soviet official. But that is not what has drawn the attention of historians. The shots fired in the Smolny Institute were followed by a new intensification of repression that is often treated as a step toward the Great Terror of 1937–1938 and the ultimate consolidation of Stalin’s dictatorship. The obvious political benefit that Stalin derived from Kirov’s murder has led historians to suspect he had a hand in bringing it about. Such suspicions even became part of official propaganda during Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization effort and Gorbachev’s perestroika. Although it is rarely helpful when politicians involve themselves in the interpretation of past events, this case may be an exception. The numerous commissions established by Khrushchev and Gorbachev compiled and studied a great body of evidence, which gives us a rather full picture of what occurred in Leningrad on 1 December 1934 and during the murder’s aftermath.
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On the evening of 1 December, a meeting of party stalwarts was scheduled to take place in Leningrad’s Tauride Palace. Kirov was to give a speech on the outcome of the Central Committee plenum that had taken place in Moscow the previous day. The topic at hand was the upcoming abolition of the ration system, a change that would affect virtually the entire population of the country. An announcement of the meeting had already been published in newspapers, and Kirov spent the entire day preparing his speech. At approximately four o’clock he summoned a car and headed to his Smolny office. Using the building’s main entrance, he climbed to the third floor, where his office and the offices of the oblast committee were located. He walked down the third floor’s main corridor to a smaller corridor to the left that led to his office. It was the job of his bodyguard, Mikhail Borisov, to keep watch over the party boss inside the building. Borisov followed Kirov at a slight distance. When Kirov turned into the small corridor leading to his office, Borisov continued down the main corridor. Kirov remained out of his sight for some moments.
Leonid Nikolaev, a party member and former employee of the Leningrad Oblast Committee, was preparing to shoot Kirov that evening at the Tauride Palace. To gain entry he needed an invitation card, and he had come to Smolny to get one, counting on help from acquaintances who worked there. Because he had a party membership card, he had no trouble entering the building. While wandering its corridors, Nikolaev unexpectedly saw Kirov walking toward him. Nikolaev turned away and let Kirov pass. Since there was nobody between him and his target, Nikolaev decided to carry out his plan immediately. He followed Kirov into the corridor leading to his office, ran up to him, and shot him in the back of the head. Nikolaev then attempted to shoot himself in the temple but was prevented from doing so. Borisov and several Smolny staff members had come running at the sound of gunfire and saw Kirov lying bloody on the floor. It was all over in an instant.
Doctors and the heads of the Leningrad NKVD were summoned to Smolny. Stalin was telephoned at his Kremlin office. As soon as he was told of Kirov’s death, the general secretary convened a series of meetings. Early the following morning, on 2 December, he arrived in Leningrad on a special train. That same day he joined other members of the team from Moscow in interrogating Nikolaev. Stalin could hardly have failed to notice that Nikolaev was not a typical ideologically motivated terrorist.
In December 1934 Leonid Vasilyevich Nikolaev was 30 years old. He had been born into a working-class family in St. Petersburg and lost his father at an early age. His family struggled with poverty, and rickets prevented Leonid from walking until the age of eleven. The record of his recruitment for military training provides a detailed description of his physical features at age twenty: long arms that extended to the knees, an elongated torso, and a height of approximately five feet. Nikolaev was often ill and had a quarrelsome disposition, but his early professional life was nevertheless fairly successful. Since his social origins were of the “correct” sort, he was able to get a job working for the Komsomol and join the party, steps that opened the door to other advantageous positions, including working for the Leningrad Oblast Committee in the same building where he later killed Kirov. But being prone to conflict, he could not hold any job for long. He was unemployed during the months leading up to the murder and spent his time filing grievances with various institutions and plotting revenge. The numerous diaries, letters, and other writings that were confiscated after his arrest show him to have been mentally unstable. His letters of grievance recounted various perceived injustices, demanded a job and a resort voucher, adopted a threatening tone, and assumed the pose of a hero whose name would go down in history alongside the great revolutionaries of the past.
Another factor contributing to Nikolaev’s state of mind was his relationship with his wife, Milda Draule, whom he met when they both worked for the Komsomol. Draule, age thirty-three in 1934, appears to have been an attractive woman whose career, unlike Nikolaev’s, was advancing successfully. In 1930, long-standing connections led to a secretarial job at the Leningrad Oblast Committee offices. There were rumors before Kirov’s death that Draule was having an affair with him, and speculation about an affair has persisted ever since.
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There is reason to believe that Kirov’s childless marriage was an unhappy one. His wife, four years his senior, was often ill and spent months at a time away from home in sanatoriums or rest homes. Although there is no hard evidence to prove that Kirov and Draule were intimate, the possibility has to be recognized. Even if Nikolaev did not believe the rumors, one can only assume that they fostered animosity toward Kirov.
Such was the man brought before Stalin at Smolny on 2 December. The
vozhd
was undoubtedly briefed on Nikolaev’s less than sterling work and party history and may even have been discreetly informed of the rumors about Kirov and Draule. Nikolaev’s appearance tended to support the idea that the shooting was the act of an embittered loner of questionable mental competence. He was brought before the Moscow commission shortly after a severe hysterical fit brought on by the murder and his own failed suicide attempt. Molotov, who was with Stalin, remembered Nikolaev as follows: “Mousey.… Short and skinny.… I think something must have made him angry … and he looked like something had offended him.”
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What Molotov remembers is probably what Stalin saw too, but treating Nikolaev as an unstable loner did not suit his purposes. Even before he left for Leningrad, an official account of Kirov’s murder had been crafted. The following day, Soviet newspapers reported that Kirov had died “at the treacherous hand of an enemy of the working class.” This interpretation was entirely predictable. At who else’s hand could a Politburo member perish? Something as mundane as murder by a jealous husband was unthinkable. Only a devious enemy of the people would fit the part. Any other interpretation cast not only Kirov but also the entire regime in an unfavorable light, making it look incapable of protecting its leaders from deranged loners. The agreed-upon narrative fit Stalin’s extreme suspiciousness and hunger for power.
Before returning to Moscow on the evening of 3 December, Stalin ordered that a case be fabricated to show that Nikolaev belonged to an organization comprised of former oppositionists, followers of Zinoviev, who had wielded power in Leningrad in the 1920s as head of city government. This task was assigned to Moscow-based NKVD investigators and Stalin’s political commissars—Nikolai Yezhov and Aleksandr Kosarev, who remained behind in Leningrad. Two years later, at the February–March 1937 plenum, Yezhov said the following about the task assigned him: “Com. Stalin … called me and Kosarev and said, ‘Look for murderers among the Zinovievites.’”
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This assignment would, of course, require creativity and law breaking. Not only had Nikolaev never belonged to any oppositionist group, but the NKVD had also never turned up the slightest evidence of oppositionist sympathies. The only way to link Nikolaev and the Zinovievites was to manufacture evidence, so under Stalin’s watchful eye, this is what the chekists did. During the investigation, Stalin was sent approximately 260 arrestee interrogation protocols and many reports. He met with senior members of the NKVD, the procuracy, and the Supreme Court’s military collegium to discuss the investigation and trial. The historical record shows that he personally orchestrated the court sessions and assembled the groups of defendants in the Kirov case.
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In accordance with Stalin’s orders, a series of trials was held in late 1934 and early 1935. Dozens of former oppositionists, whom investigators claimed had links to Nikolaev, were sentenced to be shot or imprisoned.
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Political and moral responsibility for Kirov’s murder was placed on the shoulders of the former opposition leaders Zinoviev and Kamenev, who were also put on trial. The evidence on which they were convicted was blatantly fabricated. Stalin was settling scores with his old political rivals and charging them with crimes they had not committed.
Stalin’s exploitation of Kirov’s murder has prompted a great deal of suspicion over the years. Many have accused Stalin of organizing the shooting itself. The first serious attempts to look into such accusations were undertaken during the Khrushchev thaw and continued with small interruptions into the early 1990s. These investigations have turned up some circumstantial evidence of Stalin’s involvement but no proof. At this point, it is unlikely any will be found.
Until the early 1990s, most theories about a plot by Stalin against Kirov adhered to the same basic storyline. Displeased by Kirov’s growing popularity, Stalin decided to deal with the situation and then use the murder as a pretext for mass repression. With this goal, the general secretary either directly or implicitly assigned Genrikh Yagoda, then NKVD chief, to handle the matter.
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Yagoda sent a trusted protégé, Ivan Zaporozhets, to serve as deputy in the Leningrad branch of the NKVD, where he could lay the groundwork for this supposed “act of terrorism.” Nikolaev was chosen to carry out the deed and was armed and taken under Zaporozhets’s wing. When he was arrested by NKVD agents after trying to carry out the assassination before 1 December, Zaporozhets arranged to have him released. After Kirov’s murder, those involved in the conspiracy killed the bodyguard, Mikhail Borisov, because he knew too much. On 2 December he was killed in a staged accident while being taken to Stalin by truck for questioning. Such is the basic narrative proposed by those suspecting Stalin of complicity in Kirov’s death.
This narrative does not stand up to careful examination. First of all, it is unclear why Stalin would enter into a conspiracy so fraught with risk, given that Kirov was a faithful client rather than a political rival. The evidence is also not convincing. To start with, the argument that Nikolaev would not have been able to get a firearm without help is flawed. The restrictions on gun ownership that were introduced later in the decade (partly in response to the Kirov murder) did not yet exist. Nikolaev acquired his revolver in 1918, when the country was awash in firearms, and had legal possession of it for sixteen years.
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Such ownership was nothing out of the ordinary, especially for a party member.
As for Nikolaev’s multiple detentions by the NKVD before 1 December and his “miraculous” release, records show only one such incident, not the several that some authors claim. On 15 October 1934, Nikolaev was detained by NKVD agents near Kirov’s home but released shortly thereafter after his documents were checked. According to Nikolaev’s own testimony, on that day he ran into Kirov and several companions and followed them to Kirov’s house but did not work up the nerve to speak to Kirov. “Back then I was not thinking about committing murder,” Nikolaev stated during his 2 December interrogation. After the murder, this incident, which was recorded in the NKVD incident log, was specially investigated. The NKVD agents who freed Nikolaev had a simple and convincing explanation: he had produced his party membership card and also an old identification card showing that he had worked at Smolny. His desire to approach Kirov to ask about the possibility of a job was “natural and did not arouse suspicion.”
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A cornerstone of the theories that Kirov’s murder was part of a plot is the death of the bodyguard, Borisov. During the second half of 1933, Kirov’s security team had grown to fifteen people, each with his own job. Borisov was charged with meeting Kirov at the entrance to Smolny, accompanying him to his office, waiting in the reception area while Kirov worked, and accompanying him out of the building when he left. One other member of the team—an NKVD agent like Borisov—was N. M. Dureiko, who watched over Kirov as he moved around the third floor of Smolny.
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When the shot was fired, Dureiko was walking toward Kirov in the small corridor leading to his office. It could be argued that Dureiko was just as culpable in not preventing the murder as Borisov. Nevertheless, those promoting the idea of a plot have never taken an interest in Dureiko. If the plotters felt they had to do away with Borisov, why did they leave Dureiko alive?