The Great Terror

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

During the Zinoviev Trial, the planning of the Kirov murder was said to have taken place in the summer of 1934.² Of course, the form in which this wa_•s put was untrue, but the date was do doubt thought plausible because it was around this time that Stalin himself, as we have suggested, had actually started to organize the murder. It was in August that he had spoken with Kirov about his future, and in the interim Kirov was in Central Asia, only returning to Leningrad on 1 October.³ By that time the plot was already in preparation.

According to one account, Stalin’s original plan involved replacing Filip Medved, the head of the Leningrad NKVD, with his own crony E. G. Evdokimov, the old Secret Policeman of Shakhty fame, who was on cool terms with the rest of the NKVD officers. However, this transfer was blocked by Kirov,⁴ who protested against such moves being made without the permission of the Leningrad Provincial Committee, and it had to be countermanded.

Stalin could only approach Yagoda. But, even as a second choice, it is an extraordinary idea that the head of the NKVD could be approached with an order to procure the death of a Politburo member. One plausible explanation would be that Stalin had some special hold over him. This would be quite in accord with Stalin’s style. There are a number of cases in which Stalin seems to have secured support by blackmail of this type (for example, Voroshilov, whose conduct in 1928 convinced Bukharin that this was true in his case). The rumor in Russia was that Stalin had discovered some discreditable incident in Yagoda’s pre-Revolutionary career, involving acting in some way for the Tsarist police. In the NKVD, it was said that in 1930 Yagoda’s then deputy Trilisser made an investigation of Yagoda’s past and found that he had almost entirely falsified his pre-Revolutionary record. When Trilisser reported this to Stalin, Stalin merely censured and dismissed Trilisser. But Stalin was in fact glad to have the information, and to keep on as effective head of the police a man he had something against.⁵

Yagoda selected a suitable NKVD man in Leningrad. This was Medved’s assistant Ivan Zaporozhets. Zaporozhets would naturally not accept such an assignment just at Yagoda’s orders, so he had to receive instructions from Stalin. For the junior man in particular (in Yagoda’s case, ambition must have played a more important role) the idea of Party discipline must already have been corrupted into something unrecognizable.

When Yagoda himself came to trial with the “Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites” in 1938, he testified that he had been instructed by Yenukidze “to assist in the murder of Kirov.” Although he objected, he said, “Yenulcidze insisted.” If anyone in Soviet political life was totally unqualified to insist on anything, it was Yenukidze, a far less powerful figure than Yagoda himself. If we were to substitute for him the name of a man who was in a position to insist, we should not have to look far. Yagoda went on, “Owing to this, I was compelled to instruct Zaporozhets, who occupied the post of Assistant Chief of the Regional Administration of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, not to place any obstacles in the way of the terrorist act against Kirov.”⁶

During Yagoda’s cross-examination things did not go smoothly. Without giving anything away, he yet managed to imply that there was something fishy about the whole business. Asked what methods he used in the other alleged murders, he answered, “In any case not such as … described here,” and when questioned as to whether he would confirm his own testimony at the preliminary investigation, said, “It is exaggerated, but that does not matter.” When it came to the Kirov murder itself, the following exchange was particularly odd:

Yagoda: I gave instructions … Vyshinsky: To whom? Yagoda: To Zaporozhets in Leningrad. That is not quite how it was. Vyshinsky: We shall speak about that later. What I want now is to elucidate the part played by Rykov and Bukharin in this villainous act. Yagoda: I gave instructions to Zaporozhets. When Nikolayev was detained … Vyshinsky: In whose briefcase … Yagoda: There was a revolver and a diary. And he released him. Vyshinsky: And you approved of this? Yagoda: I just took note of the fact. Vyshinsky: And then you gave instructions not to place obstacles in the way of the murder of Sergei Mironovich Kirov? Yagoda: Yes, I did…. It was not like that. Vyshinsky: In a somewhat different form? Yagoda: It was not like that, but it is not important.⁷

In Leningrad, Zaporozhets looked around for a method and found in the files a report on a disillusioned and embittered young Communist—Nikolayev. Nikolayev had told a friend that he intended to assassinate some Party figure as a protest. The friend had reported him. Through the friend, Zaporozhets got into contact with Nikolayev and saw that he was provided with a pistol. In addition, Zaporozhets got the friend to persuade Nikolayev to select Kirov as his victim.⁸

Zaporozhets’s next task was to steer his gunman to the heavily guarded Kirov. As so often in real life, his plans did not run smoothly. The revolver had been got to Nikolayev. He was worked up to assassination pitch. But his attempts to get into the Smolny did not at first succeed. He was arrested twice in that neighborhood. The first time, “a month and a half before the killing”—that is, within a couple of weeks of Kirov’s return from Kazakhstan—he was “not even searched.” The second time, only a few days before his successful attempt, he got as far as the outer guard in the Smolny. There the guard found on him “a revolver and a chart of the route Kirov usually took” (according to Yagoda at the 1938 Trial) or “a notebook and a revolver” (according to the evidence of Yagoda’s secretary Bulanov on the same occasion); in any case, “arms were found on him. But upon Zaporozhets’s instructions he was released on both occasions” (as Khrushchev was to put it in his speech to the XXIInd Party Congress in 1961).

It says a good deal for Nikolayev’s nerve that he brought himself to make his last, and successful, attempt.

Zaporozhets had gone on holiday, leaving the affair in the hands of accomplices, not yet (1989) identified. Apart from instructions to the outer guard to let Nikolayev through unsearched, the arrangements included the “temporary” abandonment of the internal guard posts on each floor. They also managed to detain Kirov’s bodyguard, Borisov. And finally, after all the earlier muddles, Stalin’s plan succeeded, and his colleague lay dead in the Smolny corridors. But there was still much to do.

When the news reached Moscow, it was announced to the accompaniment of a strong expression of grief and comradeship for the dead man by Stalin and the Politburo. Stalin, with Voroshilov, Molotov, and Zhdanov,⁹ left for Leningrad the same evening to “conduct the inquiry.” Yagoda, Agranov, and other leading NKVD men accompanied them.

Stalin and his entourage took over an entire floor of the Smolny. But before the investigation, there were political moves to be made.

An official speaker remarked at the XXIInd Party Congress in 1961:

On the day of the murder (which at that time had not yet been investigated, of course), upon Stalin’s instructions from Leningrad, a law was adopted on an accelerated, simplified and conclusive examination of political cases. This was immediately followed by a wave of arrests and political trials. It is as if they had been waiting for this pretext in order, by deceiving the Party, to launch anti-Leninist, anti-Party methods of struggle to maintain a leading position in the Party and State.¹⁰

(It is difficult to see how Stalin could have given instructions from Leningrad on the day of the murder. He traveled by train, and Leningrad and Moscow are 400 miles apart by rail. He could scarcely have arrived earlier than “the crack of dawn on 2 December”—the time given by a Soviet source.¹¹ The decree is indeed dated 1 December. Stalin doubtless put it in hand before he left and telephoned after arriving in Leningrad to have it signed by the State authorities and issued.)

The decree, decided on without consultation in the Politburo,¹² was to be a Charter of Terror over the following years. It ran:

Investigative agencies are directed to speed up the cases of those accused of the preparation or execution of acts of terror.

Judicial organs are directed not to hold up the execution of death sentences pertaining to crimes of this category in order to consider the possibility of pardon, because the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR does not consider as possible the receiving of petitions of this sort.

The organs of the Commissariat of Internal Affairs are directed to execute the death sentence against criminals of the above-mentioned category immediately after the passage of sentences.

This was published the following day, and the Politburo, presented with a fait accompli, approved it “casually” the day after that.¹³ This was the first exercise in Stalin’s new technique, by which the state of emergency was used to justify personal, and technically unconstitutional, action. In the circumstances any attempt at disapproval would have been extremely difficult. And thus even what poor guarantees Soviet law gave to “enemies of the State” were destroyed. On 10 December new Articles 466 to 470 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the RSFSR were enacted to bring it into line. We are told that the extrajudicial bodies set up at this period were instituted on the basis of a draft by Kaganovich.¹⁴

Stalin then turned to the inquiry. He at once discovered various snags. First, Borisov, whose devotion to Kirov was well known, had become suspicious. This was dealt with at once. On 2 December “an accident occurred to the automobile which took Borisov to the Smolny. Borisov was killed in the accident, and in this way they got rid of a dangerous witness” (Bulanov’s evidence in the 1938 Trial). This was, much later, interestingly expanded by Khrushchev:

When the chief of Kirov’s bodyguard was being taken for questioning—and he was to be questioned by Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov—the car, as its driver said afterward, was involved in an accident deliberately arranged by those who were taking the man to the interrogation. They said that he died as a result of the accident, even though he was actually killed by those who accompanied him.

In this way, the man who guarded Kirov was killed. Later, those who killed him were shot. This was no accident but a carefully planned crime. Who could have done this? A thorough investigation is now being made into the circumstances of this complicated affair. It transpires that the driver of the car in which the chief of Kirov’s bodyguard was being taken for questioning is alive. He has said that an NKVD operative sat with him in the cab during the drive. They went in a lorry. It is, of course, very strange why a lorry was used to take the man for questioning, as if no other vehicle could be found for the purpose. Evidently, everything had been planned in advance and in detail. Two other NKVD operatives were in the back of the lorry, together with Kirov’s chief bodyguard.

The driver continued his story. When they were driving through one street, the man sitting next to him suddenly took the steering wheel from his hands and steered the car directly at a house. The driver regained control of the wheel and steered the car, and it only hit the wall of the house sideways. He was told later that Kirov’s chief bodyguard lost his life in this accident. Why did he die when no other person in the car suffered? Why were both officials of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, escorting Kirov’s chief bodyguard, later shot? This means that someone wanted to have them liquidated and to remove all traces.¹⁵

Why did Stalin dispose of Borisov in such a roundabout way? It seems that in view of Borisov’s known loyalty to Kirov, to have him shot or “disappear” as an accomplice of Nikolayev’s would have aroused instant incredulity in the Leningrad Party organization. It was not until 1938, when such considerations no longer applied, that Borisov was alleged to have been an accomplice.¹⁶

And here we may note that the Khrushchevite version of the Kirov affair, with all its air of throwing fresh light, did not produce any facts incompatible with Stalin’s own final version. As we see, on the murder of Borisov, the essentials had emerged as to the 1938 Trial. Almost every detail of Yagoda’s and Zaporozhets’s involvement was given at that trial. Why, then, we may ask, did Khrushchev produce the same material—with insubstantial additional detail—as though it amounted to a great revelation? The answer clearly is that he meant to imply something further. And this method of dealing with the case—of implication—is the one that was pursued in the Soviet Union from 1956 to 1964.

In his Secret Speech of February 1956, Khrushchev said, “It must be asserted that to this day the circumstances surrounding Kirov’s murder hide many things which are inexplicable and mysterious and demand the most careful examination.” This was said in the context of an attack on Stalin. But nothing was made explicit. At the XXIInd Party Congress in October 1961 Khrushchev said, this time in public: “Great efforts are still needed to find out who was really to blame for his death. The more deeply we study the materials connected with Kirov’s death, the more questions arise…. A thorough inquiry is now being made into the circumstances of this complicated case.” The same cautious line was taken by other speakers. But the “inquiry” was slow to produce results. And in a Pravda article of 7 February 1964, the hint was conveyed by remarking that Kirov represented an obstacle to Stalin’s ambitions and going on immediately to add: “Less than a year had passed after the XVIIth Congress when a criminal hand cut short life of Kirov…. This was a premeditated and carefully prepared crime the circumstances of which, as N. S. Khrushchev declared at the XXIInd Congress, have not yet been fully cleared up.”

Short of actually saying that Stalin was responsible, an announcement which still seemed to stick in the Soviet throat, it would hardly be possible to make the point more clearly. If we still had to find out who was really to “blame,” then obviously the case against the previously blamed—Zinoviev and Kamenev, and later the Rightists—was no longer sustained. Only one major suspect remained. Stalin’s daughter, writing in 1963, rightly speaks of “transparent hints” then being given in Russia that her father was responsible. And there is no doubt that they were so intended and so taken.fn2¹⁷ But it was not until 1988 that Yagoda was officially implicated and Stalin often, though not yet officially, named as mainly responsible. The latest Soviet account concludes, “Stalin’s participation in the murder is extremely probable, though there is no documentary confirmation”; or, as Khrushchev put it in a section of his memoirs which remained unpublished until mid-1989, “Yagoda could only have acted on secret orders from Stalin.”¹⁸

With Borisov liquidated, Stalin was left with the major problem—Nikolayev.

Leonid Nikolayev had, indeed, been a dupe of Stalin, Yagoda, and Zaporozhets. But he had also acted on his own beliefs. He has, naturally, been treated in a hostile fashion by every generation of Soviet and of oppositionist commentators, including the present one. And his act, far from bringing any benefit to Russia, was made the excuse for worse tyranny than ever. For these and other reasons, it is not easy to get a clear idea of the thirty-year-old tyrannicide.

Like many revolutionaries, he seems to have been something of a misfit. He had fought in the Civil War as a teenager, and afterward had been unable to make a successful career amid an increasingly bureaucratic society.

A Party member since 1920, he had not been known as an oppositionist, and, indeed, seems to have been very hostile to Trotskyism.

Nikolayev had been out of work since March 1934, when he seems to have attacked a decision sending him to work outside the city, which he believed to be a piece of bureaucratic intrigue.¹⁹ He had been expelled from the Party for this breach of discipline,²⁰ but his membership had been restored two months later on his making a declaration of repentance.²¹

After the crime, he had been interrogated by local men before the Moscow delegation arrived, and through some slip had realized that the NKVD had been using him. When he was brought before Stalin, he said so flatly and was removed. Even if he could be tortured into temporary submission, it was out of the question to produce him in open court.

Ordering Agranov to follow up the “Zinovievite” line as best he could, Stalin returned to Moscow and for the moment satisfied himself with other measures to intensify the atmosphere of terror.

Back in the capital, Kirov’s body lay in state. The highest in the land mounted guard over it in the Hall of Columns. When Stalin saw the corpse, the Soviet press noted, he appeared so overcome by emotion that he went forward and kissed it on the cheek. It would be interesting to speculate on his feelings at that moment.

It is a trifle ironic that Zinoviev, too, had just expressed his sorrow over Kirov’s death, in an obituary rejected by Pravda, and that at the 1936 Trial Vyshinsky was to speak of it in these terms: “The miscreant, the murderer, mourns over his victim! Has anything like it ever occurred before? What can one say, what words can one use fully to describe the utter baseness and loathsomeness of this: Sacrilege! Perfidy! Duplicity! Cunning!”²²

On 4 December it was announced that Medved had been dismissed (and replaced by Agranov) and that he and seven of his subordinates would be brought before a court for their failure to protect Kirov; Zaporozhets’s name was not among them. A long list of those arrested in connection with the case in Moscow and Leningrad, all “White Guards,” was given at the same time. Within a few days, “trials” of these, under the new decree, were announced. In Leningrad, the Stalinist judge I. 0. Matulevich chaired a circuit court of the Military Collegium which, on 5 December, sentenced thirty-seven named “White Guards” to death for “preparation and organization of terrorist acts against officials of the Soviet regime,” and in Moscow a similar session under the even more notorious V. V. Ulrikh did the same for thirty-three others.²³

On 13 December, Ulrikh went down to Kiev to preside over the sentencing to death of twenty-eight Ukrainians. They too were charged with “organizing acts of terror against officials of the Soviet Government,” and it was also said that most of them had been “apprehended with revolvers and hand grenades.”²⁴ In this Ukrainian case we chance to know more about those concerned than we do about the victims in Leningrad and Moscow. Although the accused in all three cases were charged with having, in their majority, crossed the frontier from abroad for their terrorist purposes, we find that these Ukrainians were almost all well-known writers and cultural and social workers. Apart from one minor diplomat, and a poet who had visited Germany, they had been living in the Ukraine for years.²⁵ There was later a brief attack on one of them, the deaf poet Vlyzko.²⁶

These official executions were supplemented by scores of others performed with less formality. Throughout the country, a great wave of arrests swept in thousands of those listed in the NKVD records as in one way or another politically suspect. The period of comparative relaxation was now at an end.

The last great assassination and attempted assassination had been in August 1918, when Socialist Revolutionaries killed Uritsky and wounded Lenin. Following that, Sverdlov had issued a hysterical call for “merciless mass terror,” adding that there was no doubt that the assassins would turn out to be “hirelings of the English and French.” In the event, hundreds of prisoners were shot as reprisals. Few Bolsheviks (apart from the brave Olminsky) made any protest. Now that a similar case had arisen, how could they object to the slaughter of a few score “White Guards” from Leningrad and elsewhere?

There was one typical distinction between the two terrors. Stalin implied that the victims of his terror decree were actually associated with the crime, while in Lenin’s time those shot had quite frankly been no more than class hostages.

Amid this orgy of shootings, the Soviet press was launched into one of those campaigns replete with calls for vigilance and ruthlessness towards the hidden enemy which were to appear at intervals throughout Stalin’s life. An atmosphere was created, in fact, in which no voice of even comparative reason or moderation could raise itself. The mutual denunciation sessions in which Communists fought for their Party membership, and indeed for their lives, by panicky and sycophantic accusations against their own accusers had died down to some considerable extent since 1933; they now revived. The “moderate” line toward the rank-and-file opposition was reversed. Thousands who had been readmitted to the Party were expelled.

In December 1934 a secret letter from the Central Committee, entitled “Lessons of the Events Connected with the Evil Murder of Comrade Kirov,” was sent to all Party Committees. It amounted to a call to them to hunt down, expel, and arrest all former oppositionists who remained in the Party organizations and was followed by a storm of indiscriminate denunciations. At this early phase in the Purge, however, some discrimination was still shown in the action taken on these. Friendship with an exposed “Trotskyite” usually received a severe reprimand rather than expulsion: “only a few years later,” Merle Fainsod comments, “such mild punishment would come to be regarded not merely as extreme liberalism, but as clear indication of the complicity of the judges in counter-revolutionary activity.”²⁷ Throughout the month the press attacked Trotskyites discovered in various parts of the Union, censured Party organizations for “rotten liberalism,” and called for vigilance. Mass deportations to Siberia and the Arctic took place. Within a few months 30,000 to 40,000 Leningraders had already been taken.²⁸

A typical case from the times, of which dozens might be related, was that of the writer Alexander G. Lebedenko, who was arrested in Leningrad in January 1935 and exiled. One and a half years later—that is, in mid-1937—he was sentenced without trial or investigation, by decision of an NKVD Troika, to twenty years’ isolation, and was released after the XXth Congress in 1956.²⁹

Meanwhile, Agranov had been working on the Zinoviev connection. He established a connection between Nikolayev and the men who had been leading figures in the Leningrad Komsomol during Zinoviev’s ascendancy in the city. The most prominent was I. I. Kotolynov, former member of the Central Committee of the Komsomol. It had been Kotolynov who had boldly protested at the Stalinist bully boys who were then taking over the youth organization, saying of them, “They have the mentality—if he is not a Stalinist, put on the screws, let him have it, chase him so hard that he won’t open his mouth again.”³⁰ He had, in fact, been a real oppositionist, and one against whom a real grudge persisted. Right through the Purge, this was to be a bad combination.

Agranov found that Kotolynov and some others of this group had met for discussion in 1934 because the local Party Institute was talking of producing a history of the Leningrad Komsomol. These meetings, encouraged by Kirov, were quite open and under Party control, but unorthodox views had been expressed. Agranov built this up into a “conspiracy.” Nine other men who had been present, including another former member of the Komsomol Central Committee, Rumyantsev, were arrested. They were under arrest, or some of them were, by 6 December.³¹ “Severe” interrogation methods were employed.

Even so, most of the young oppositionists refused to capitulate. This method of dealing with Party members was new, and they could not have had the feeling of hopelessness which later set in in similar circumstances. On the contrary, the whole thing must have seemed a dangerous and horrible lunacy of the interrogators, which might be overruled at any moment. By 12–13 December,³² Agranov nevertheless had one or two confessions ready. These connected the former oppositionist Komsomols of Leningrad with Kamenev and Zinoviev, who had met their former supporters once or twice in an innocent way.³³ Agranov’s report to Stalin represented this as Kamenev and Zinoviev going back on their various promises to “disarm” politically and in effect as a sort of conspiracy.

When this report came before the Politburo, in “an atmosphere of extreme tension,”³⁴ the majority still supported the liberalization envisaged by Kirov. Stalin accepted this warmly, but added that it should be amended at one point: since the opposition had failed to disarm, the Party should in self-defense undertake a check of all former Trotskyites and Zinovievites. This was agreed to with some hesitation, and as to the assassination itself, it was to be left to the investigating authorities.³⁵

Before the middle of the month, G. E. Evdokimov, former Secretary of the Central Committee, Bakayev, who had been Zinoviev’s head of the Leningrad GPU, and others were arrested. Zinoviev then drafted a letter to Yagoda saying that he was disturbed by these arrests and asking to be summoned so that he could establish that he had no connection with the murder. Kamenev dissuaded him from sending it.³⁶

On 16 December, Pauker, Head of the Operations Department of the NKVD, and Bulanov, Yagoda’s personal assistant, arrested Kamenev, and at the same time Molchanov, Head of the Secret Political Department, and Volovich, Deputy Head of the Operations Department,fn3 pulled in Zinoviev.³⁷ It says something for the respect which leading Old Bolshevik oppositionists even then commanded in the Party that the routine “search” was dispensed with.³⁸

For the first four or five days after the murder, the press had been full of the demands of workers’ meetings for revenge, accounts of Kirov’s life, descriptions of his lying in state and his funeral, listings of executed “White Guard” terrorists, and so on. Then came, for a week or ten days, a curious pause. But now, on 17 December, the Moscow Committee of the Party passed a resolution to the effect that “loathsome, hateful agents of the class enemy, foul dregs of the former Zinoviev anti-Party group, have torn Comrade Kirov from our midst,” the first public reference to the alleged political feelings behind the murder.³⁹ The Leningrad Committee, which had just “elected” Andrei Zhdanov as Kirov’s replacement (on 16 December), passed a resolution in almost identical terms.

As yet, no NKVD announcement had directly blamed the assassination on anyone but Nikolayev. The “White Guards” had been vaguely charged with “terrorism.” On 21 December, it was at last officially stated that Kirov had been murdered by a “Leningrad Center,” headed by Kotolynov, and consisting of him, Nikolayev, and six others—all of them categorized as former members of the Zinoviev opposition who had “at various times been expelled from the Party,” though mostly restored to membership after statements of solidarity with the Party Line.⁴⁰ Six other accomplices were also implicated.

On the following day, a list was given for the first time of the arrested Zinovievite leaders, with a decision on the conduct of their cases.

There were distinguished names among them: Zinoviev and Kamenev, formerly members of the Politburo; G. E. Evdokimov, formerly member of the Secretariat; other former members and candidate members of the Central Committee—Zalutsky, who had formed with Molotov and Shlyapnikov the first Bolshevik Committee in Petrograd after the February Revolution; Fedorov; Kuklin; Safarov.⁴¹ For the moment, a partial accusation went forward. Regarding seven of those arrested, including Zinoviev, Kamenev, Zalutsky, and Safarov, it was announced that the NKVD, “lacking sufficient data for bringing them before a court,” would take them before a Special Board, with a view to sending them into administrative exile. With the others, headed by Bakayev, “further investigation” would take place. It was a typical Stalin move—suitable for gradually getting his colleagues and the Party used to the idea of Zinoviev’s guilt, and at the same time complicated and confusing enough to mask or blur his real intent.

Of the fifteen now mentioned, ten were to appear in the first ZinovievKamenev Trial the following month, together with nine not previously named.

On 27 December the formal accusation against the Nikolayev “group” was published. Now fourteen in number, they had allegedly been working since August, keeping a watch on Kirov’s flat and office, and deducing his usual movements. “Witnesses” were mentioned—Nikolayev’s wife, Milda Draule; his brother; and others. The conspirators were accused of having planned to kill Stalin, Molotov, and Kaganovich in addition to Kirov. And Nikolayev was also said to have been passing anti-Soviet material to an unspecified foreign consul, who later turned out to be the Latvian Bisseneks, though the NKVD is said to have originally favored his Finnish colleague.⁴² The already executed “White Guards” were vaguely worked in through connections Nikolayev was said to have formed with “Denikinists.”

“Documentary evidence” was mentioned, including a diary of Nikolayev’s and statements he had prepared. Apparently these showed clearly that he had no accomplices. It could not be totally suppressed at this stage, as too many uninitiated investigators and others seem to have seen it. So the official account, mentioning the diary, says that it was a forgery designed to give the impression that there was no conspiracy, but only a protest against the “unjust treatment of individuals,”⁴³ or, as a later and fuller version has it:

The accused Nikolayev prepared several documents (a diary, declarations addressed to various institutions, etc.) in which he tried to represent his crime as a personal manifestation of despair and discontent arising from the aggravation of his material situation and a protest against the unjust attitude of certain members of the Government toward a living person.⁴⁴

Three volumes of testimony are cited, each of them at least 200 pages long, including various confessions.⁴⁵ From all this it might have been expected that the prosecution could have held an open trial. It did not do so. On 28 and 29 December, a court presided over by the ubiquitous Ulrikh sat behind closed doors.

For the more important of Nikolayev’s alleged accomplices seem still to have refused to confess in spite of severe interrogation.⁴⁶ There were rumors, to put it no higher, that fellow prisoners had seen Kotolynov at the time of his interrogation, badly scarred and beaten.⁴⁷ But he and the other Zinovievite ex-Komsomols are said to have resisted to the end. The published announcement of their “trial” reported the conspirators as saying that their motive for killing Kirov was to replace the leadership with Zinoviev and Kamenev.⁴⁸ Nikolayev and all the others were sentenced to death and executed on 29 December.

The result so far was not entirely satisfactory to Stalin. The Party would still scarcely have accepted a direct incrimination of Zinoviev and Kamenev simply on trust, without the assassin being produced to testify to it in public. Moreover, after the first shock of Kirov’s death had died down, a strong element in the Politburo and elsewhere continued to put out Kirov’s own line of reconciliation and relaxation.

Negotiations were afoot with the imprisoned opposition leaders to get them to assume the entire guilt for reasons of Party discipline, but these were unproductive. On the other hand, they began to feel that it was in their own interests to do all they could to discourage terrorism, which could only lead to worse repressions against themselves and their followers. So they finally agreed to accept “moral responsibility” for the murder—in that the assassin could conceivably have been encouraged to his act by their political attitudes.

On 15 and 16 January, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Evdokimov, Bakayev, Kuklin, and fourteen others were brought to trial in Leningrad as the “Moscow Center.” Ulrikh again presided, and Vyshinsky prosecuted. The line taken was that, knowing the terrorist inclination of Kotolynov’s “Leningrad Center,” those now accused had given it political encouragement.

The new trial was not, however, reported fully. Only a three-quarter-page summary appeared in the press, with a few quotations from the evidence of Zinoviev and others admitting their partial guilt. The group was said to have been “exposed” by Bakayev and by Safarov, who was not on trial.⁴⁹ Bakayev, who had been under interrogation for over a month, seems to have made the fullest confession. Zinoviev was reported as saying in court, “The former activity of the former opposition could not, by the force of objective circumstances, but stimulate the degeneration of those criminals.”⁵⁰ He took full responsibility for those he had misled, and summed up by remarking that

the task that I see confronting me on this subject is to repent fully, frankly and sincerely, before the court of the working class, for what I understand to be a mistake and a crime, and to say it in such a way that it should all end, once and for all, for this group.⁵¹

But though this general acceptance of the moral responsibility of the opposition was made, charges of more sinister involvement were rejected. Kamenev expressed his lack of trust in the “witness” Safarov; he also stated flatly that he did not know of the existence of the “Moscow Center,” of which it now turned out he was an active member, though insofar as it existed he took responsibility for it.⁵² Zinoviev, too, said that many of those in the dock were unknown to him,⁵³ and added that he learned of Kotolynov’s role only from the indictment in the “Leningrad Center” Case.⁵⁴ In spite of the partial surrender of the oppositionists, it is clear that their stand was not fully satisfactory to Stalin and that a public trial would not have been a success.

On 16 January 1935 Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, Evdokimov to eight, Bakayev to eight, and Kamenev to five. The other sentences ranged from ten years to five. At the same time, it was announced that the NKVD Special Board had sentenced forty-nine people, including Zalutsky, to “confinement to concentration camps for a period of four to five years,” while twenty-nine others, including Safarov, had been sentenced to exile. The length of the sentences was in any case to prove unimportant, as there is no known instance of any of these figures, major or minor, ever being released. Two days after the trial (18 January 1935) a further secret circular on vigilance was issued by the Central Committee—an official call to all branches to start rooting out “enemies” which significantly condemned lack of vigilance as “a re-echoing of the Right deviation.”⁵⁵ A fresh wave of arrests, running into tens of thousands, now struck all the former opposition and other suspects at local levels.

There was still one batch of prisoners from the Kirov Case left to be dealt with—the Leningrad NKVD leadership, whose forthcoming trial had been announced on 4 December. On 23 January they finally came before a court under, as ever, Ulrikh. Instead of the nine originally charged, there were now twelve—and Zaporozhets was among them. Medved and Zaporozhets were charged with failure to observe the basic requirements of State security, in that “having received information about the preparations for the attempt on S. M. Kirov … they failed to take the necessary measures to prevent the assassination … although they had every possible means of arresting it.”

The sentences were extremely light. One official, Baltsevich, got ten years for—in addition to the main charge—unspecified wrongful acts during the investigation. Medved got three years, and the others either two or three. The sentences were specifically to be served in a kontslager (concentration camp), a word soon to fall into disuse.

These sentences struck observant NKVD officers as totally out of proportion to the charges, especially as those sentenced for mere “negligence” got two years, and those for “criminal negligence” (apart from Baltsevich) three years—only one year more! Stalin’s natural reaction to a criminal failure to guard against a genuine assassination attempt—of the sort which might strike him next—would have been the exemplary execution of all the NKVD defaulters; in fact, they could scarcely have avoided a charge of complicity in the actual crime. But the whole thing became even odder and more sinister when it was discovered that Medved and Zaporozhets were being treated as though the sentences were little more than a tedious formality.

As was later said at the 1938 Trial, Yagoda displayed “exceptional and unusual solicitude” towards them. He had “entrusted the care of the families of Zaporozhets and Medved” to his personal secretary, Bulanov; he had “sent them for detention to the camp in an unusual way—not in the car for prisoners, but in a special through car. Before sending them, he had Zaporozhets and Medved brought to see him.”⁵⁶

This is, of course, impossible to conceive as a personal initiative of Yagoda’s. A higher protection was being provided. Moreover, NKVD officers learned that Pauker and Shanin (Head of the NKVD Transport Department) were sending records and radio sets to Zaporozhets in exile—contrary to the strict Stalinist rule of instantly breaking even with one’s best friend, once arrested.⁵⁷

After the various odd circumstances of the whole Kirov Case, it was this above all which convinced many officials that Stalin had approved, if not arranged, the Kirov killing. The true story gradually filtered through the NKVD apparatus. Even then it was recounted with great reserve. Both Orlov and Krivitsky were told, as the former puts it, “The whole affair is so dangerous that it is healthier not to know too much about it.”⁵⁸

A prisoner from the White Sea Canal camps reports that Medved appeared at the headquarters of the camp complex, arriving by train in a special compartment and being put up by the head of the project, Rappaport, in his own house, where he gave a party for him. Medved was wearing an NKVD uniform without the insignia of his rank. He then went on, in the same style, to Solovetsk.⁵⁹

When the ice of the Okhotsk Sea made the move possible, Medved, Zaporozhets, and all the others we can trace were sent to Kolyma, where they were technically prisoners, but in fact given high posts—Zaporozhets as head of the road-building administration in the Kolyma complex.⁶⁰

As to the final fate of these NKVD exiles, Khrushchev was to remark twenty years later: “After the murder of Kirov, top functionaries of the Leningrad NKVD 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.”⁶¹

Khrushchev’s point is fairly taken, but it is too crudely put. No doubt, in a general way, Stalin favored silencing those who knew his secrets. In fact, during the Zinoviev–Kamenev Trial of 1936, the accused are represented as planning, “after their seizure of power, to put Bakayev in charge of the NKVD with a view to ‘covering up traces’ by killing all officials who might have knowledge of the plot, and also so that the conspiratorial group could destroy its own activists, its own terrorist gunmen.” As the conspiracy was simply an invention of Stalin’s with evidence faked to suit, this shows that he thought it natural to shoot NKVD men and others who knew too much.

But Stalin could scarcely liquidate everyone who knew of, or suspected, his crimes. It was not practical politics to execute Yagoda’s subordinates until there had been time for all sorts of leaks. If it comes to that, several men who were in possession of some of Stalin’s worst secrets—like Shkiryatov, Poskrebyshev, Vyshinsky, Beria, and Mekhlis—survived until 1953 to 1955, while Kaganovich is still alive.

It is true that in 1937 a great purge swept the NKVD in Kolyma. Once it was decided to expose Yagoda’s part in the Kirov murder, and to tell the whole story of the NKVD involvement, it was time to sacrifice all concerned. At the 1938 Trial, Zaporozhets’s role was plainly described, and it was announced that he had not appeared in court because he was being made the “subject of separate proceedings.” This seems to confirm that he was then still alive but that, if such was the case, he would not long remain so.

With the January 1935 trial of the Leningrad NKVD chiefs, the Kirov Case was wound up—for the time being. The old Zinoviev oppositionists were all in prison. Leningrad had been taken from independent hands and put under Stalin’s devoted satrap, Zhdanov. A terror expressed mainly in mass deportations, but partly in mass executions, had struck the city and—to a lesser extent—the country as a whole. Among the victims brought to book in this aftermath, Nikolayev’s wife, Milda Draule, together with Olga Draule (her sister) and another relative, were tried by the Military Collegium and were shot on 10 March 1935.⁶²

The murder of Kirov was indeed the key moment in Stalin’s road to absolute power and extreme terror. Eugenia Ginzburg starts her Journey into the Whirlwind with the sentence “The year 1937 began, to all intents and purposes, at the end of 1934—to be exact, on the first of December.” As a recent Soviet article puts it, “It marked a turning point”: prior to 1 December there was a chance of better things and the scales of history trembled, but “Stalin threw Nikolayev’s smoking gun into the scales.”⁶³ Another, in a more formal analysis, agrees, while adding that of course this does not mean that Stalin’s action was unpremeditated or that he was now to carry out his whole program immediately.⁶⁴ In fact, much remained to be done to crush his opponents entirely and to overcome the resistance of his less enthusiastic allies. The coup de grace had not been given. And meanwhile hostility to his actions was once again arising in the lower levels of the Party.

In the Komsomol, for example, there was surprisingly frank resistance to Stalinism as late as 1935. The Secret Archive⁶⁵ from Smolensk province reveals the extent of this feeling. In a Komsomol discussion on the Kirov assassination, one member is quoted as saying, “When Kirov was killed they allowed free trade in bread; when Stalin is killed, all the kolkhozes will be divided up.” A Komsomol school director, serving as a propagandist, declared, “Lenin wrote in his will that Stalin could not serve as leader of the Party.” Another teacher accused Stalin of having transformed the Party into a gendarmerie over the people. A nine-year-old Pioneer was reported to have shouted, “Down with Soviet Power! When I grow up, I am going to kill Stalin.” An eleven-year-old schoolboy was overheard saying, “Under Lenin we lived well, but under Stalin we live badly.” And a sixteen-year-old student was said to have declared, “They killed Kirov; now let them kill Stalin.” There were even occasional expressions of sympathy for the opposition. A worker Komsomol was quoted as saying, “They have slandered Zinoviev enough; he did a great deal for the Revolution.” A Komsomol propagandist in answer to a question denied that Zinoviev had had any hand in the Kirov affair and described him as an “honored leader and cultivated man.” An instructor of a district Komsomol committee “came out in open support of the views of Zinoviev.”

In fact, there was much to do before a situation satisfactory to Stalin could be established.