Sergei
Kirov was born in Urzhum, Russia,
on 15th March, 1886. His parents died when he was young and he was
brought up by his grandmother until he was seven when he was sent
to an orphanage.
At the
Kazan Technical School he became a Marxist
and joined the Social Democratic Party in
1904. He took part in the 1905 Revolution
in St. Petersburg. He was arrested but was released after three months
in prison.
Kirov now
joined the Bolshevik faction of the
Social Democratic Party. He lived in Tomsk
where he was involved in the printing of revolutionary literature.
He also helped to organize a successful strike of railway workers.
In 1906
Kirov moved to Moscow but he was soon arrested for printing illegal
literature. Several of his comrades were executed but he was sentenced
to three years in prison. The prison had a good library and during
his stay he took the opportunity to improve his education.
Kirov returned
to revolutionary activity after his release and in 1915 he was once
again arrested for printing illegal literature. After a year in custody
he moved to the Caucasus where he stayed until the abdication of Nicholas
II in March, 1917.
After the
October Revolution Kirov was sent to
fight the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Caucasus. He fought in the
Red Army until the defeat of General Anton
Denikin in 1920.
In 1921
Kirov was put in charge of the Azerbaijan party organization and the
following year helped organize the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated
Socialist Republic.
Kirov
loyally supported Joseph Stalin and in
1926 he was rewarded by being appointed head of the Leningrad party
organization. He joined the Politburo in 1930 and now one of the leading
figures in the party, and many felt that he was being groomed for
the future leadership of the party by Stalin.
In the
summer of 1932 Joseph Stalin became aware
that opposition to his policies were growing. Some party members were
publicly criticizing Stalin and calling for the readmission of Leon
Trotsky to the party. When the issue was discussed at the Politburo,
Stalin demanded that the critics should be arrested and executed.
Kirov, who up to this time had been a staunch Stalinist, argued against
this policy. When the vote was taken, the majority of the Politburo
supported Kirov against Stalin.
In the
spring of 1934 Kirov put forward a policy of reconciliation. He argued
that people should be released from prison who had opposed the government's
policy on collective farms and industrialization. Once again, Joseph
Stalin found himself in a minority in the Politburo.
After years
of arranging for the removal of his opponents from the party, Joseph
Stalin realized he still could not rely on the total support of
the people whom he had replaced them with. Stalin no doubt began to
wonder if Kirov was willing to wait for his mentor to die before becoming
leader of the party. Stalin was particularly concerned by Kirov's
willingness to argue with him in public. He feared that this would
undermine his authority in the party.
As usual,
that summer Kirov and Joseph Stalin went
on holiday together. Stalin, who treated Kirov like a son, used this
opportunity to try to persuade him to remain loyal to his leadership.
Stalin asked him to leave Leningrad to join him in Moscow. Stalin
wanted Kirov in a place where he could keep a close eye on him. When
Kirov refused, Stalin knew he had lost control over his protégé.
Sergei
Kirov was assassinated by a young party member, Leonid Nikolayev,
on 1st December, 1934. Stalin claimed that Nikolayev was part of a
larger conspiracy led by Leon Trotsky
against the Soviet government. This resulted in the arrest and execution
of Genrikh Yagoda, Lev
Kamenev, Gregory Zinoviev, and fourteen
other party members who had been critical of Stalin.
(1)
The Granat Encyclopaedia of the
Russian Revolution was published by the Soviet government in 1924.
The encyclopaedia included a collection of autobiographies and biographies
of over two hundred people involved in the Russian
Revolution. This included one written by Sergei Kirov.
The prison library was quite satisfactory, and in addition
one was able to receive all the legal writings of the time. The only
hindrances to study were the savage sentences of courts as a result
of which tens of people were hanged. On many a night the solitary
block of the Tomsk country prison echoed with condemned men shouting
heart-rending farewells to life and their comrades as they were led
away to execution. But in general, it was immeasurably easier to study
in prison than as an underground militant at liberty.
(2)
Alexander Orlov was a NKVD officer who
escaped to the United States.
Stalin decided to arrange for the assassination of Kirov
and to lay the crime at the door of the former leaders of the opposition
and thus with one blow do away with Lenin's former comrades. Stalin
came to the conclusion that, if he could prove that Zinoviev and Kamenev
and other leaders of the opposition had shed the blood of Kirov, "the
beloved son of the party", a member of the Politburo, he then
would be justified in demanding blood for blood.
(3)
The New Republic (9th January,
1935)
Up to last
Sunday 117 persons had been executed in Soviet Russia as the direct
result of the Kirov assassination. To what extent are Zinoviev and
Kamenev implicated in the plot. The hysteria of Karl Radek's and Nikolai
Bukharin's charges against them in Pravda and Izvestia
fails to carry conviction.
Russia's
right to crush Nazi-White Guard conspiracies or other plots of murder
and arson no one questions; few have anything but approval for it.
What is in question is the guilt of particular persons who have not
been tried in an open court of law.
(4)
Victor Kravchenko, I Choose Freedom (1947)
Hundreds
of suspects in Leningrad were rounded up and shot summarily, without
trial. Hundreds of others, dragged from prison cells where they had
been confined for years, were executed in a gesture of official vengeance
against the Party's enemies. The first accounts of Kirov's death said
that the assassin had acted as a tool of dastardly foreigners - Estonian,
Polish, German and finally British. Then came a series of official
reports vaguely linking Nikolayev with present and past followers
of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev and other dissident old Bolsheviks.
Almost hourly the circle of those supposedly implicated, directly
or "morally", was widened until it embraced anyone and everyone
who had ever raised a doubt about any Stalinist policy.
(5)
Nikita Khrushchev, speech to the Twentieth
Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (1956)
There are
reasons for the suspicion that the killer of Kirov, Nikolayev, was
assisted by someone from among the people whose duty it was to protect
the person of Kirov. A month and a half before the killing, Nikolayev
was arrested on the grounds of suspicious behaviour but he was released
and not even searched. It is an unusually suspicious circumstances
that the member of the Secret Police assigned to protect Kirov was
being brought for an interrogation, on 2nd December, 1934, he was
killed in a car accident in which no other occupants of the car were
harmed.
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