The Great Terror

2 The Kirov Murder

fn1

There are earlier assassinations in Russia’s own history which may also have inspired Stalin; for example, the killing of Prime Minister Stolypin in 1911 by an assassin who seems to have acted with the approval and connivance of the Tsarist Secret Police, which objected to Stolypin’s policies.

fn2

Stalin’s similar complicity in the murder of the Yiddish actor-producer Solomon Mikhoels in Minsk in 1948 now seems well established. Described at the time as an accident, it was admitted in the Khrushchev era to have been the work of the MGB (

Sovetskaya Byelorossiya

, 13 January 1963; Svetlana Alliluyeva,

Only One Year

[London, 1969], p. 190).

fn3

All four NKVD officers were later themselves to be denounced and shot as conspiratorsPauker and Volovich as German spies in addition.