Stalin

CHAPTER 4 TERRORISM

Yesterday I was at the NKVD. . . . I understood that, in order to demonstrate my loyalty, I need to work harder for the NKVD. He said that if I work well, everything will remain a secret, but otherwise I could be deported from Moscow. I was given three main tasks in my work . . . the October Revolution celebrations and conversations. Is an assassination attempt against Stalin not being prepared . . . By the way, in front of him lay a file two fingers high all about me.

Informant’s notes, November 1934¹

STALIN’S UNDERSTANDING OF WORLD markets remained amateurish, but he had a keen appreciation for technology. As of 1934, the Soviets possessed 3,500 tanks (T-26s, BTs, T-28s), as well as another 4,000 armored vehicles (T-27s). Fighter planes of Soviet make and mobile artillery were also coming off assembly lines in numbers. Even radios were beginning to spread widely in the armed forces (in 1930, there had been zero among the field units). Overall troop strength had grown from 586,000 in 1927 to nearly a million. The command staff was more educated, having completed courses at the many military academies.² From August 30 to September 4, 1934, the Red Army conducted its annual fall maneuvers in Ukraine, which the Polish consul in Kiev interpreted as “a demonstration against foreign countries, particularly Japan.” The exercises went badly, though. Mechanization presented underappreciated organizational and logistical challenges, raising the stakes for Soviet diplomacy.³

Much of Stalin’s holiday back-and-forth with Moscow, from Gagra and Sochi, in September 1934 concerned his customary pressure on the harvest collection but also foreign affairs.⁴ Over the summer, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania had conveyed their readiness to sign on to the Franco-Soviet proposal for a broad Eastern Pact, but Estonia and Latvia made their membership conditional on Germany’s and Poland’s. So did Britain, which also made its support for a parallel Franco-Soviet alliance conditional on Germany’s inclusion in that.⁵ On September 11, 1934, Hitler definitively rejected any Eastern Pact. Poland’s rejection would soon follow. Stalin was urged to grasp the French option without Germany, embracing an antifascist coalition.⁶ Negotiations for the large state credit from the German government, initiated at Berlin’s request, had bogged down. But Stalin reassured Kuibyshev (September 14), in a telegram, which, as usual, became a politburo decree, that “the Germans will not walk away from us, because they need a [trade] agreement with us more than we need one from them.”⁷ Nonetheless, on September 18, the Soviet Union formally joined the League of Nations, after intensive diplomacy to line up other countries’ votes.⁸ Many Communist party and Youth League members cringed at joining the Versailles imperialist order.⁹ Stalin himself had once denounced the League as “an anti-working-class comedy.”¹⁰

Soviet newspapers explained that some imperialist powers, although ill-disposed toward socialism, did not want to see an anti-Soviet military intervention, for fear it would spark a world war directed at themselves.¹¹ Joining the League was also a prerequisite to alliance with France or a broader regional security structure. Nonetheless, at Stalin’s urging, the politburo resolved (September 23), “Do not hurry with the initiative of an [Eastern] Pact without Germany and Poland.” France slowed for its own reasons.¹² It was courting Mussolini in a common front to guarantee Austria’s sovereignty against Nazi pressure, part of which involved France’s help in normalizing Italo-Yugoslav relations. On October 9, Yugoslavia’s King Alexander I landed on a state visit at the Marseilles harbor, where he was promptly assassinated. French foreign minister Louis Barthou was killed in the police cross fire. The assassin, beaten to death on the spot, was Macedonian and a member of the Croatian terrorist ring, the Ustaše, led by Ante Pavelić and protected by Mussolini.¹³ Soviet intelligence suspected the Nazi secret police of aiming to destabilize Yugoslavia and to liquidate a bulwark of friendly Franco-Soviet relations. Stalin wrote to Kaganovich and Molotov, “In my opinion, the murder of Barthou and Alexander is the work of the hand of German-Polish intelligence.”¹⁴

Inside the Comintern, Dimitrov, supported by Manuilsky, Kuusinen, Thorez, and Wilhelm Pieck, continued pushing for a shift to a popular front, while Pyatnitsky, Knorin, Kun, and others held to the anti–Social Democrat line. Dimitrov implored Stalin for assistance in changing the structure and personnel of the Comintern’s “leading organs.” Eventually Stalin got around to sending a handwritten note. “As you can see, I am late in replying, and I apologize for that,” he wrote. “Here on holiday, I do not sit in one place, but move from one location to another. . . . I entirely agree with you regarding the review of the methods of work of the Comintern organs, their reorganization and the changes in their composition. I have already mentioned this to you during our meeting at the Central Committee. . . . I hope to see you soon and to discuss all in detail. I have no doubt that the politburo will support you. Greetings!”¹⁵ The planned 7th Comintern Congress was postponed yet again.¹⁶

The zigs and zags were seen domestically, too. A group at the Stalin metallurgical factory in Novokuznetsk, Siberia, had been arrested, and Stalin instructed Kaganovich that “all those drawn into spying on behalf of Japan be shot.” Local party head Eihe was empowered to approve executions on his own from September through November.¹⁷ The same power was soon granted to party bosses in Chelyabinsk and in Central Asia, in connection with alleged sabotage of the cotton campaign.¹⁸ At the same time, petitions reached Stalin from people in the Gulag convicted in fabricated cases of wrecking and espionage on behalf of Japan, and the dictator (September 11, 1934) redirected the claims of confessions extracted under torture to Kuibyshev and Zhdanov, noting that “it is possible the content of both documents corresponds to reality,” and called for a commission to “cleanse the ranks of the secret police of bearers of certain ‘interrogation devices’ and punish the latter regardless of who it might be.” The commission upheld the two petitions and brought additional cases, detailing, in an October 1934 report, how NKVD operatives were detaining those accused in freezing cells for days on end, holding them in suffocating positions, and threatening to shoot them until they “confessed.” Stalin approved a suggestion to send plenipotentiaries to Azerbaijan for a “thorough investigation” of efforts to advance careers through sheer quantity of confessions extracted.¹⁹

A need for recovery and reconciliation following the famine had been evident, and in that regard the conciliatory “Congress of Victors” had been a success. But now a vague sense of a bigger shift—League of Nations membership, a less hectic second Five-Year Plan, a stress on legality—gained momentum. To be sure, reconciliation hardly suited Stalin’s character or his theory of rule: the sharpening of the class struggle as socialism became successful; the special danger of enemies with party cards.²⁰ Nonetheless, secret police arrests started declining precipitously.²¹ A relative relaxation was visible in culture as well, even beyond Stalin’s indulgence of non-party writers. “Not long ago a music critic, seeing in his dream a saxophone or [Leonid] Utyosov, would have awoken in a cold sweat and run to Soviet Art to confess his errors,” wrote the militant Komsomol Pravda (October 27, 1934) about the Soviet Union’s newly famous jazz band. “Now? Now there is no refuge from ‘My Masha.’ Wherever you go, she sits ‘At the Samovar.’”²²

Stalin finally returned to Moscow on October 29, 1934.²³ While he was away, 1,038 of that year’s 3,945 politburo agenda items had been decided, most with his approval; sixteen of the year’s forty-six politburo meetings had taken place in his absence.²⁴ Litvinov again wrote to Stalin and Molotov (November 1) insisting that Germany’s rebuilt military power would assuredly be used against the USSR, with the support of Poland, Finland, and Japan. The next day, Stalin relented: the politburo authorized negotiations for an Eastern Pact with just France and Czechoslovakia, or even France alone, an apparent concession to “collective security.”²⁵ Stalin remained attentive to his own security as well. Inside his suite at Old Square, in his wing in the Kremlin’s Imperial Senate, and at his Moscow and southern dachas, only NKVD personnel were permitted to carry weapons. Those whom Stalin received were supposed to check any weapons they had upon entering the premises. (Some were searched.)²⁶ Propaganda notwithstanding, the prospect of an assassination—akin to what had happened to the Yugoslav king in Marseilles—seemed utterly remote.

KIROV AND CHAPAYEV

Stalin’s return from southern holidays was still being marked by informal gatherings initiated by members of his extended family, who showed up at his apartment in the Imperial Senate at suppertime and played with the children, waiting, hoping to catch him. “Yesterday, after a three-month interval, I saw Iosif,” Maria Svanidze, his first wife’s sister-in-law, wrote in her diary (November 4, 1934). “He looked well, tanned, but he had lost weight. He suffered from flu there. . . . I[osif] joked with Zhenya, that she had again filled out, and he was very tender with her,” Svanidze added. “Now, when I know everything, I observed them.” Yevgeniya “Zhenya” Alliluyeva, an actress, was married to Pavel Alliluyev (the brother of Stalin’s second wife, Nadya), and a jealous Svanidze suspected an affair. Stalin had deeper interests. “After the meal Iosif was in a very good-natured mood,” she continued. “He took the Intercity vertushka and called Kirov, joking with him about the end of rationing and the price rise for bread. He advised Kirov to come to Moscow immediately, in order to defend the interests of Leningrad province against an even higher price rise than in other provinces. Evidently Kirov demurred, and Iosif gave the phone to Kaganovich, who urged Kirov to come for a day. Iosif loves Kirov and after returning from Sochi really wanted to see him, steam in a Russian bath together.”²⁷

The revolution’s seventeenth anniversary approached. At the Bolshoi on the evening before the November 7 parade, the ballerina Marina Semyonova (b. 1908) performed a Caucasus dance. “She danced in a light gray Circassian vest and light gray Astrakhan ‘Kubanka,’ and when, with the last gesture, she held back her Kubanka on her head, her blond hair sprayed down her shoulders,” Artyom recalled. “This made a colossal impression on the audience; everyone shouted ‘Bravo, encore.’” Semyonova went to curtsy at the left loge, where Stalin sat, over the orchestra, practically on the stage. He bent down to the ballerina and said something. “She nodded, gave the orchestra a signal, and repeated the dance.” After the concert, Stalin said to his entourage, “Semyonova is the best of all.”²⁸ She was the common-law wife of Karakhan, the former first deputy foreign affairs commissar, demoted by Stalin to ambassador to Turkey; rumors spread of her affair with Stalin.²⁹

Stalin’s bachelor life was not all rumors. Kirov did come, after the November holiday. In the evenings, now that Nadya was gone, Stalin had taken to watching films with his entourage.³⁰ On November 10 (and into the morning of the 11th), Boris Shumyatsky, head of the motion picture industry, screened the new film Chapayev for the dictator, Kirov, and Molotov.³¹ Shumyatsky had been born in Ulan Ude (1886) near Lake Baikal, was a former Soviet envoy to Iran and former rector of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, and had replaced Martemyan Ryutin as head of the film industry back when it was considered a backwater, but had built it up. At the Kremlin cinema soft chairs with ample armrests and high backs, concealing who was in them, were placed three across, in several rows. The floor was covered in a drab gray cloth, over which was placed a runner, muffling noise from movement. Stalin issued comments during the screenings, in the dark, and afterward when the lights were back on. Tables for Georgian mineral water and wines sat alongside each chair.³² “We used to go after dinner, about nine in the evening,” Svetlana recalled. “It was late for me, of course, but I begged so hard that my father couldn’t refuse. He’d push me to the front with a laugh: ‘You show us how to get there, House Mistress. Without you to guide us, we’d never find it!’” Stalin often watched more than one film, and Svetlana would go to bed sometimes after midnight, even on school nights. “I’d get out of the movie late and go racing home through the empty, quiet Kremlin. The next day at school, I could think of nothing but the heroes I’d seen on film the night before.”³³

Chapayev portrayed the civil war hero of that name as a real human being, warts and all, and the Whites as worthy foes. Stalin had already seen it twice and fallen in love with its down-home details. “You should be congratulated,” he had said to the always anxious Shumyatsky. “It’s done very well, cleverly and tactfully. Chapayev, Furmanov, and Petka are good. The film will have great educational significance. It’s a nice gift for the holiday.” Chapayev induced Stalin to push for construction of sound cinemas all across the Union (there were just 400 to 500 of them, out of some 30,000 film-showing installations).³⁴ “I will be taking a greater interest in this than previously,” he had told Shumyatsky on November 9–10.³⁵ At the November 10–11 screening, Stalin turned to Kirov and accused him of never visiting the film studio in Leningrad (Chapayev was their production). “You know, here people are speaking about your Leningrad films, and you don’t even know them. You don’t know the riches lurking there, probably you never even watch films.” Kirov, Stalin joked, had “bureaucratized.”³⁶

Stalin invited Shumyatsky to stay for supper. The film boss seized the moment to point out that the state planning commission was being tight with funding, allocating 50 million rubles for the next year instead of the “minimal” 92 million requested. “You hear that, Molotov? That’s not the way,” Stalin said. “Look into it.” Shumyatsky also mentioned that initial reviews of Chapayev were favorable but had stressed the wrong themes.³⁷ “Akh, those critics,” Stalin responded. “They disorient people.” The dictator phoned Mekhlis and ordered something more glowing, which Pravda published the next day (November 12). Stalin—now also joined by Kalinin and Molotov’s wife, Zhemchuzhina—decided to view Chapayev for a second time that night. “The more you watch it,” he said, “the better it seems, the more you find new aspects in it.” The evening lasted until 2:00 a.m.³⁸ On November 13, after work, Kirov accompanied Stalin to the Zubalovo dacha, where they played billiards and watched a puppet show put on by Svetlana and other children, before repairing to Stalin’s new Near Dacha for supper. At Zubalovo, the Stalin family dined on the smelt and whitefish Kirov had brought. “With Kirov,” Svanidze noted, Svetlana “has a great friendship, because I[osif] is especially close and good with him.”³⁹

UNDER THE GUN

Filipp Medved’s nerves were on edge. An ethnic Belorussian (b. 1889), he had joined the party in 1907 (one of his recommenders was Felix Dzierżyński) and had recently helped organize the White Sea–Baltic Canal construction. Now he headed the secret police in Leningrad, an international port and frontier city swimming with foreign consulates and military factories. Known to relish banquets, Medved had put on weight and taken to drink (Armenian brandy), while his wife, Raisa Kopylovskaya, came on to other men in public. (Rumors had Medved imprisoning the Leningrad torgsin shop manager after Raisa flirted with him; she might have been involved in self-enrichment schemes, too.) Whisperings about Medved’s supposed homosexuality (he had kissed the openly gay jazzman Utyosov on the mouth in public) further undermined his authority.⁴⁰ His first deputy, Ivan Zaporozhets, was widely seen as Yagoda’s “spy.”⁴¹ And those were the least of Medved’s worries.

Stalin had no confidence in him. The dictator continued to be frustrated over a perceived NKVD mishmash of promiscuous arrests and indolence against enemies.⁴² Yagoda (“in accordance with your instructions”) had sent a team of operatives to investigate the Leningrad and Siberian NKVD branches. “The facts that were uncovered,” he had reported to Stalin (September 1934), “convinced me that [Nikolai] Alekseyev (Western Siberian NKVD) and Medved are absolutely incapable of leading our work in the new conditions and providing that sharp turnabout in state security management methods now necessary.” Yagoda proposed sacking the two branch chiefs, to set examples, and recommended a chessboard of transfers, which would bring Henriks Štubis (b. 1894), an ethnic Latvian known as Leonid Zakovsky (“unquestionably a strong and capable operative”), from Belorussia to Leningrad, with Medved recalled to Moscow to determine “if he is still fit for work in the NKVD or utterly burned out.”⁴³

This was the second time Medved’s transfer had been bruited; the first, in 1931, Kirov had blocked. The Leningrad party boss socialized with him (the childless Kirov was especially fond of Medved’s boy Misha).⁴⁴ Kirov was also an infamous womanizer, whose carousing was a matter of citywide gossip. Kirov’s wife, Maria Markus (b. early 1880s), was Jewish (like the wives of Molotov, Voroshilov, Andreyev, Kuibyshev, and Poskryobyshev). They had met in Vladikavkaz in 1909, at the offices of the newspaper Terek, where she worked as a bookkeeper. She suffered from headaches, insomnia, and a hormonal disorder, frequently screamed, and threatened to kill herself; her windows had been barred. She’d had a few small strokes and was effectively confined to a state rest home in suburban Tolmachevo.⁴⁵ To what extent she knew of her husband’s extramarital affairs—ballerinas, young women in the apparatus—remains unclear, but they were certainly Medved’s worry: he had to help conceal them, even as he was under severe pressure from Pauker in Moscow to strengthen Kirov’s protection.⁴⁶ Kirov’s personal guard had ballooned from three to as many as fifteen men after Stalin’s visit to Leningrad in summer 1933, and Kirov’s office had been relocated to a less accessible location.⁴⁷

MONGOLS AND KIROV

On November 15, 1934, Stalin received a delegation led by Mongolian prime minister Genden, the latter’s third annual audience with Stalin, an unusual number for any foreign leader, but impoverished, landlocked Mongolia was the Soviet Union’s sole “ally.” As a result of purges and mass quitting, the Mongolian People’s Party, already severely outnumbered by lamas, had dropped to half its peak strength of 40,000.⁴⁸ Stalin, over the course of three hours, pressed Genden on the lamas: How numerous and powerful were the monks? Did the people follow them or the Communists? How did the monks finance their activities? These issues, Genden tried to answer, were “complex,” “subtle.” “In a war in which you cannot defeat the enemy by a frontal assault, you should use roundabout maneuvering,” Stalin advised. “Your first action should be to put your own teachers in the schools to battle the monks for influence among the youth. Teachers and activists must be the direct conduits of your policy. . . . The government must build more water wells to show the people that they, not the monks, are more concerned about their economic needs.” He also advised producing films and promoting theater in the Mongolian language and building a strong army of functionally and politically literate conscripts.

Stalin divulged his theory of rule. “In connection with the big lamas who commit this or that political crime, you need to punish them, bringing them to court for treason against the motherland, and not for general indictment of counterrevolutionary work,” he explained. “In such cases, you need open trials so that the commoners, the arats, understand that the lamas are linked to foreign enemies; they betrayed the motherland. But you can do this only from time to time at this point.” He added: “Foreign powers will not recognize you as long as it is unclear who is stronger, you or the monks. After you strengthen your government and army and raise the economic and cultural level of your people, the imperialist powers will acknowledge you. If they do not, now being strong, you can spit in their faces.”⁴⁹

This was how Stalin was ruling the Soviet Union.

Genden, the offspring of a poor nomad family who had learned to read and write, was a gifted politician with a feel for the masses, and full of guile. Trying to ingratiate himself, he announced that the illiterate Choibalsan (b. 1895), minister of livestock and agriculture, who had spent considerable time in Moscow being groomed by Voroshilov, would become first deputy prime minister. Choibalsan was already serving as a Soviet agent in the Mongolian leadership.⁵⁰

Agranov forwarded to Stalin a decrypted intercept of a telegram (November 17, 1934) from ambassador Joseph Grew, in Tokyo, to the U.S. State Department, concerning a conversation with Japanese foreign minister Kōki Hirota, who had stated that, given the various agreements among European powers, Japan could not remain isolated and would have to follow suit. “A decision was taken such that the foreign ministry would search for an ally,” Hirota was quoted as saying of the cabinet. “The chosen country should above all have no specific interests in Asia. In this category could be included Russia or England.” Stalin underlined that passage. “But the USSR is completely excluded as a potential ally because of its aggressive position toward Japan and its interests.” By contrast, Hirota thought a deal could be reached with Britain over weapons sales and trade, provided Japanese interests were recognized in China. The United States was also on Hirota’s potential ally list, and he concluded what Grew deemed an “unusual conversation” with a desire for friendly relations. Stalin wrote on the document, “And so it happens, it’s become tough for Hirota. Interesting.”⁵¹

On November 27, Stalin received the Mongols again, this time with Kirov in tow, even though he was not a member of the politburo’s Mongolia commission.Stalin began by noting that he was forgiving all of Mongolia’s debt as of January 1, 1934—30 million tugriks, the equivalent of almost 10 million gold rubles (at the official exchange rate)—and half the debt accumulated in the coming year: another 33 million tugriks, with the other half to be paid starting in 1941. “If you do not have a good army, the imperialists, Japan, will swallow you,” he said, pointing out that the Mongolian army numbered only 10,000. He said their army budget was 14 million tugriks but offered to pay 6 million a year for five years for expansion, and advised the Mongols to pay their portion with state monopolies on tobacco, salt, and matches, alongside alcohol. He also informed them that they needed to sign bilateral pacts of nonaggression and of mutual assistance, but that the second, for now, would not be published, a message for Japan, but not an overly provocative one.⁵² The nonpublic pact would allow the Red Army to defend the USSR by reassuming advance positions on Mongolian territory. “There should be a difference between Soviet assistance in wartime and in peacetime,” Demid, a graduate of the prestigious Officers’ Cavalry School in Tver, urged.⁵³ Resistance proved futile, however.⁵⁴ Soon, some 2,000 Red Army troops would reenter Mongolia.

Kirov had returned to Moscow because of a Central Committee plenum, the third and final of the year, from November 25 to 28, 1934. It dealt with the end of bread rationing, which involved some 50 million people, a costly subsidy and administrative expense amid financial challenges. Rye bread, which cost 50 kopecks per kilo in a state store with a ration coupon (and 1 ruble 50 kopecks at commercial shops), would now cost 1 ruble, a significant increase for workers.⁵⁵ “What is the idea of the policy of abolition of the rationing system?” Stalin remarked at the plenum. “The cash economy is one of the few bourgeois economic mechanisms that we socialists must make full use of. . . . It is very flexible, and we need it.”⁵⁶ Kirov said little, as usual. Afterward, Stalin took a small group, including Kirov, to the Kremlin cinema, where Shumyatsky showed Chapayev, which Stalin said he was seeing for the eleventh time. Orjonikidze, meanwhile, was suffering from heart palpitations and stomach pains. He had been the only member of the inner circle left out of that fall’s harvest mobilization, and had had his holiday extended. Stalin had compelled him to stay away from the capital until November 29. By the time Orjonikidze returned to Moscow, his friend Kirov had left.⁵⁷ Stalin saw Kirov off at the station.⁵⁸

A TERRORIST

Leonid Nikolayev (b. 1904) was a misfit. He had been born in Leningrad, the son of an alcoholic (who died when the boy was three or four), suffered from rickets as a toddler, and developed bowed legs. He left school around age twelve, when his mother, a night cleaning woman at a tram depot, apprenticed him to a watch repairman. But 1917 had revolutionized Nikolayev’s fortunes: he served as a village soviet chairman in 1919–20, while barely a teenager; became a candidate and, within a month, a full member of the party in 1924 (during the “levy” following Lenin’s death); and got appointed as a Communist Youth League functionary in Zinoviev’s Leningrad machine.⁵⁹ Nikolayev was sent to the nearby town of Luga, where he met and, in 1925, married Milda Draule (b. 1901), an ethnic Latvian and gymnasium graduate, petite, round-faced, with brown hair, who worked as a bookkeeper in the county party apparatus and was a zealot, too. She and Leonid moved in with his mother, grandmother, unmarried sister, married sister, and brother-in-law in Leningrad, and in 1927 the couple had their first child, whom they named Karl Marx (“Marx” for short). Milda quit working for a time. The Five-Year Plan had opened further horizons for working-class offspring such as Nikolayev, but matters went sour. He had a quarrelsome nature. In 1929, he was fired from his latest job (as a clerk at the Red Arsenal Factory), and then from another factory, and in spring 1930 he was mobilized by the party to Eastern Siberia for the sowing and harvest campaigns.

Milda got hired as a bookkeeper in the Leningrad provincial party apparatus, now under Kirov, and was soon promoted to the department for light industry personnel. Nikolayev returned from Siberia in 1931, and in April he got a position as an assessor in the provincial party apparatus. In November 1931, the couple had a second child, Leonid. They were able to obtain a three-room apartment in a fee-based cooperative. Her elderly, infirm parents lived with them.⁶⁰ But in the meantime he had been shifted to the Youth League’s Down with Illiteracy Society, his thirteenth place of work (as recorded in his official labor book).⁶¹ Acquaintances got him a post in the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate, but he was fired in October 1932. Draule had lost her provincial party sinecure, being transferred in August 1933 to the provincial heavy-industry bookkeeping squad, at first as a temporary worker, though she obtained regular status in January 1934 and was awarded prizes. Nikolayev signed on as an itinerant lecturer for the Institute of Party History, in the provincial party organization, but on March 31, 1934, he was summoned before a party commission for refusing “mobilization” to transport (to give lectures to railroad workers). A party meeting deemed him “rude, extremely unrestrained, hysterical.” After he spoke, one of the members asked, “Is Nikolayev’s psychological condition normal?”⁶²

Nikolayev was expelled from the party and fired, losing his ration coupons. On appeal, his expulsion was reversed in May 1934, and replaced by a severe reprimand—still a black mark in his file. Out of work, angry at perceived party slights, and reduced to living off his wife’s earnings, he petitioned like a demon to overturn his reprimand and secure what he regarded as suitable employment for a working-class Communist—as an apparatchik. In July 1934, he wrote to Kirov, and on August 25 to Stalin, only to have his letters rerouted to the perceived source of his troubles: the Leningrad party machine.⁶³ On October 9, with his family facing eviction from their cooperative apartment, a despairing Nikolayev wrote to the politburo, “I request that I be given in the first instance, in the shortest possible time, treatment at a sanatorium-resort, but if such a possibility does not exist, then I must give up belief and hope in a rescue.” This letter, too, was rerouted to the Leningrad party.⁶⁴ Nikolayev began stalking Kirov. On October 15, he trailed him on the long walk from the Uritsky (Tauride) Palace to the Trinity Bridge and on toward his residence, in the elite building at Red Dawn Street, 26–28. (Chekhov had lived there before the revolution.) The guard detained Nikolayev and took him to NKVD headquarters (“the House of Tears,” as he called it).

Nikolayev’s torn attaché case was found to contain newspapers and books. He had a party card and his old pass from when he had worked at party HQ. “He was a member of the party, had earlier worked in Smolny, and (only) tried to approach Kirov with a request for help in getting a job,” surmised the responsible operative Alexander Gubin, who, after a subordinate’s oral report, ordered Nikolayev’s release.⁶⁵ Like many civil war veterans, Nikolayev owned a Nagant revolver—1895 model, 1912 issue—which he had obtained in 1918 and reregistered in 1924 and 1930 (both times allowing the registration to lapse). But whether he was carrying the gun that day remains uncertain.⁶⁶ On October 19, 1934, Nikolayev was in Smolny but failed once more to obtain an audience with Kirov. He was increasingly incensed at the discrepancy between the workers’ state and the state of workers, as reflected in his own life.

Nikolayev had been keeping a notebook/diary about himself and Milda, devout Communists living through world-historical times, which originally was intended for their children’s edification but now became a place to ponder his options. His text contained grammatical errors, but Nikolayev read Aleksei Tolstoy and Gorky, imagining he could impart a literary quality to his writings.⁶⁷ He wrote of Milda as “my only true companion” but began to reproach her, too, recording, on October 26, “M., you could have prevented much, but you did not wish to,” evidently disappointed she had not used her connections to land him a position. “Wrote to everyone, no one left, wrote to Kirov, Stalin, politburo, party Control Commission, but no one pays attention,” he recorded, portraying himself as one of the few brave people ready to sacrifice himself “for the sake of (all of) humanity.”⁶⁸

Three days later, an entry averred that “the time for action has arrived” and evoked the organizer of Alexander II’s assassination, Andrei Zhelyabov of the People’s Will, who had been executed (Lenin had compared him to Robespierre). “As a soldier of the revolution, no death frightens me. I am ready for anything now, and no one has the power to preempt that.” Nikolayev appeared to be using his diary writing to steel his resolve, and contemplated going over the heads of the party bureaucracy to the working masses, to teach the party a lesson.⁶⁹

Nikolayev diagrammed Kirov’s routes, some possible shot angles and methods of assassination: “After first shot, run to his car: a) smash window and fire; b) open door.” He also continued to write plaintive letters seeking recourse, while underscoring the plight of workers stuck in queues versus the good life of speculators. On November 5, 1934, he glimpsed Kirov’s passing car but did not shoot through the glass.⁷⁰ On November 14, Nikolayev went to Leningrad’s Moscow Station yet again, looking for Kirov to arrive on the overnight train; this time Kirov did disembark, but Nikolayev could not get close. On November 21 he wrote another farewell to Milda (“My days are numbered, no one is coming to our aid. . . . Forgive me for everything”).⁷¹ After Kirov departed for the plenum in Moscow, Nikolayev stalked the station once more, but on November 29, when Kirov returned, he again could not get close. As it happened, however, Nikolayev read in that day’s Leningrad Pravda that at 6:00 p.m. on December 1, in the old Tauride Palace, Kirov would be reporting on the recent plenum in Moscow to the Leningrad “party active.”

HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY

On the morning of Kirov’s speech, Nikolayev called Milda at work, twice, for assistance in getting a ticket. By 1:00 p.m. he had learned that she could not or would not deliver. He went to the ward party committee around 1:30 p.m. One official suggested he could get him a ticket by the end of the day. For insurance, Nikolayev went to Smolny to try his luck with former co-workers. Smolny was an entire complex of buildings where 1,829 people worked and thousands more came and went. Besides the province and city party machines, more than fifteen organizations had offices there, including a department for the disfranchised and the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate (on the second floor), where Nikolayev had worked. The inner courtyard connected to a residential building that housed 160 families, and there was a pigsty for supplying the cafeteria. The door to the building’s north wing, where top officials had offices on the third floor, required a special key, but it was given out freely: there was a hairdresser on the first floor, through the same entryway.⁷² Access to the third floor was governed by mere possession of a party card (for non-party members, a special pass). Nikolayev showed his party card and for an hour traipsed from office to office. His acquaintances rebuffed his pleadings for a ticket, but one promised to come through at the end of the day. Nikolayev exited and walked around. Close to 4:30 p.m., he returned and climbed to the third floor. He stopped off at the toilet, to relieve himself or hide (or both). He claimed that when he came out, he unexpectedly saw Kirov in the long corridor, coming toward him, fifteen to twenty paces away, unaccompanied.⁷³

Whether Kirov was expected at Smolny that day—a Saturday—before his speech remains uncertain. His purpose in stopping by also remains unclear. One story has it that he wanted to inquire about the preparations for the end of rationing, which was generating social anxiety. Mikhail Chudov, the second secretary, was chairing a meeting of some twenty apparatchiks at 3:00 p.m. to draft resolutions for a Leningrad party plenum on rationing that was scheduled for the day after Kirov’s ticketed speech. Or maybe Kirov wanted to touch up his speech one last time with his deputy.⁷⁴ Be that as it may, at 4:00 p.m. Kirov had exited his apartment building, walked toward the Trinity Bridge, and gotten into his chauffeured car. He was trailed by the usual escort car with two guards, but at what distance remains unclear: Kirov would hound Medved after he had spotted a trailing vehicle. The traveling guard was supposed to deliver Kirov to other members of the detail once at Smolny. Inside, Kirov’s head bodyguard, Mikhail Borisov—who had started in Kirov’s detail in the 1920s—was to accompany him everywhere and, when Kirov entered his office, to remain in the reception room with Kirov’s top aide, Nikolai Sveshnikov. But the guard detail had been complaining to superiors that Kirov interfered with their duties (their latest complaint had been on November 16, 1934, to Pauker).

Kirov—a politburo member—insisted that the guards stay back and not cross his vision.⁷⁵ On December 1, the fifty-three-year-old Borisov, who was not in good physical form, was maintaining a fair distance, as many as thirty paces. The corridor was L-shaped, and, after Kirov turned left onto the shorter part, where his office had been relocated for safety, Borisov could not see him.⁷⁶

Kirov’s two-room suite at the far end of the short corridor was near a special stairwell and elevator protected by a lockable glass door (many people had keys), but he refused to use this special side entrance established for him. His back room, accessible only from his front one, was used not just by him but also as a private lunch space by leaders of the provincial and city party committees and provincial and city soviets. Directly across the hall was a canteen that attracted traffic, too. Workmen were coming and going on the third floor that day. As Kirov approached Nikolayev in the long part of the L-corridor, Nikolayev turned his back. Kirov passed. The corridor was dim. (Kirov was farsighted yet refused to wear glasses in public, wary of resembling a member of the intelligentsia.)⁷⁷ Nikolayev looked around and, he claimed, saw no one else. “When he turned left toward his office, whose disposition I knew well, the entire half of the [short] corridor was empty—I rushed forward five steps, pulled the Nagant revolver out of my pocket on the run, brought the muzzle to Kirov’s head, and fired one shot into his forehead,” Nikolayev would testify. “Kirov immediately fell face first.” Nikolayev then tried to shoot himself but either was foiled by an electrician who had heard the first gunshot or lost consciousness and slid down the wall next to Kirov’s body, now in a pool of blood.⁷⁸

Medved was two miles from Smolny, at NKVD headquarters (Volodarsky, formerly Liteiny, Boulevard, no. 4), when the call came in. He threw down the receiver and exclaimed, “Kirov’s been shot.”⁷⁹ First deputy Zaporozhets was away (he had broken his leg by falling from a horse during an equestrian competition and, after his cast was removed, had been given a holiday on November 13 at an NKVD resort in Sochi).⁸⁰ Medved and second deputy Fyodor Fomin (an old Yevdokimov protégé) dashed over to Smolny. Kirov had been shot between 4:30 and 4:37 and found to have no pulse seconds later. Testimony suggests that he was carried into his office around seven or eight minutes later and laid on the conference table, where doctors vainly attempted to resuscitate him.⁸¹ Local security personnel, having heard the shot, claimed that they had secured Smolny’s third floor and that very soon the general alarm had been activated, a signal to seal the entire building. About twenty minutes after Medved had hastened out of the NKVD building, he ordered a contingent of thirty NKVD operatives dispatched to Smolny to detain and question everyone inside. But already, in Chudov’s office, adjacent to Kirov’s, the first interrogation was recorded as having commenced at 4:45, just minutes after the shooting—it was the questioning of Milda Draule. If this was accurate, she had to have been on-site when the shooting occurred.⁸²

Ten or so witnesses on the third floor that day—bodyguards, an electrician attending to circuit breakers after some lights went out, a stockman, the director of the circus awaiting a meeting, various functionaries, Nikolayev himself—all placed the shooting in the corridor outside Chudov’s office. Kirov was said to have been found on the floor facedown, head toward the back stairwell, Nikolayev on the floor faceup, head the other way.⁸³ But a special forensic analysis performed by a Russian defense ministry team in 2004 on the bullet hole in the rear of Kirov’s cap concluded, from the angle of entry, that either Nikolayev was lying on the floor when he fired the gun or Kirov was lying down. The forensic analysis also turned up large stains from dried semen on the underpants that Kirov had been wearing (on the front top, inside). In theory, NKVD interrogators could have arranged the testimony of even multiple witnesses to disguise the morally damaging circumstance that an esteemed leader had not been carried to the conference table in his office but was already on it, in flagrante delicto.^{84, 85} Crucially, however, there was no way to prove the exact position of the cap while it was on Kirov’s head.

Two shots had been fired. (All seven bullets in the gun were accounted for: five were still inside the revolver.) Kirov was hit by only one bullet (later extracted from his head), which was confirmed to have been fired from the Nagant registered to Nikolayev.⁸⁶ The second bullet was recovered from the floor (a ricochet mark was found on a cornice where wall and ceiling met). The upward angle of the bullet entry, fired from behind at close range, can likely be explained by the fact that although Kirov was short, Nikolayev was even shorter.⁸⁷

As for the semen, already on the night of December 1 rumors were circulating—tracked by the NKVD—of a liaison with Draule having caused Kirov’s demise. Despite arrests, this gossip persisted. At one enterprise, the non-party Khasanov was overheard to say, “Nikolayev killed comrade Kirov because he lived with his wife.” A candidate member of the party, Gubler, when asked why Nikolayev had killed Kirov, responded, “Because of tarts.” At the Leningrad timber company: “Rumors are circulating that Kirov was killed because of personal score-settling, since he lived with Nikolayev’s wife.” An employee of the Southern Water Station: “I know why they killed Kirov—I spoke with Kirov’s cook and she told me that it was because of a woman, because of jealousy.”⁸⁸ The pants semen does seem to indicate some sort of tryst the day of the assassination, but that would have been far easier to arrange and hide at Kirov’s residence, where he spent most of the day, with his wife away at Tolmachevo. (Kirov answered the door when a courier delivered documents.)⁸⁹ As we saw, Draule was in Smolny. The rumors seem to reflect a timeworn trope of the jealous husband and Kirov’s general reputation rather than specifics.⁹⁰ Of course, even if nothing happened that afternoon between Kirov and Draule, the pair could have been lovers. Draule, under interrogation, denied an affair with Kirov.⁹¹ But if she was lying, it is still striking that neither Nikolayev’s handwritten notebook/diary nor his testimony alluded to being cuckolded by Kirov.⁹²

Nikolayev had been bundled into a side office on the third floor, whence he was whisked to NKVD headquarters, where he alternated between wailing uncontrollably and falling silent while staring at a single point. He was carried on a stretcher to the NKVD’s internal clinic for examination at around 6:40 p.m.⁹³ Only around 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. could the NKVD interrogate him. Besides the gun, Nikolayev had been carrying his attaché case and was found to be in possession of a party card, a pass to the Smolny cafeteria (from his workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate days), which was how his identity was quickly established, and an address book, which is how his relatives were quickly found. At searches of his and his mother’s apartments, operatives found copies of his various letters to the authorities, the numerous notebooks comprising a diary, the sketch of Kirov’s routes, a fragmentary plan of assassination, secret letters to his wife about his plotting and willingness to die, and instructions on where to find these letters—the kind of treasure trove of documentary evidence never adduced at any of the countless fabricated trials.

“I prepared the whole thing myself,” Nikolayev was recorded as having told Medved, Fomin, and other Leningrad operatives the night of the assassination, “and I never let anyone know of my intentions.” He added: “There was a single reason—estrangement from the party, from which the events in the Leningrad Institute of Party History pushed me away, my unemployment, and the lack of material and, above all, moral assistance from the party organizations. My whole situation reverberated from the moment I was expelled from the party (eight months ago), which discredited me in the eyes of party organizations.” Nikolayev enumerated all his fruitless letters for redress, adding, “There was a single aim of the assassination: for it to become a political signal to the party that over the past eight to ten years on my path of life and work, there has accumulated the baggage of unjust treatment of a living person on the part of certain state persons. . . . This historic mission has been accomplished by me. I had to show the whole party where they had brought Nikolayev.”⁹⁴

CAVALCADE