This day marked the beginning of a new phase in the history of the Soviet Union. The assassination of Sergei Kirov gave rise to the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens. The ‘Great Purge’ and the ‘Great Terror’ were becoming a reality.
Enemy no. 1
Enemy no. 1
Sergei Kirov – one of the group of the so-called “old Bolsheviks”, from 1921 to 1925 the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan SSR, and from 1926 until his death in 1934 the first secretary of the Leningrad Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan. He was known as a supporter of Stalinist policies, whilst at the same time he was viewed as a counterweight to Joseph Stalin’s increasingly powerful rule. Some of the delegates arriving at the 17th Congress of the Bolshevik Party were even to offer him the post of party general secretary, held by none other than Stalin himself. Kirov rejected this idea and informed the Soviet leader of everything. Nevertheless, Stalin began to hold his colleague in deep disfavour. However, that was not the end of it. Not only did Kirov receive more votes in the party vote at the congress, but his speech was preceded by a 10-minute ovation, the likes of which only Stalin was entitled to. It was all too much for Dzhugashvili. He decided to get rid of Kirov.
A murder on commission
On the evening of the 1st of December 1934, Kirov was assassinated just a stone’s throw from his office at the Leningrad party headquarters. Another communist activist – Leonid Nikolaev – was said to have been waiting for him in the corridor and fired a shot into his back. The same day, as soon as news of the assassination reached the Kremlin, Stalin, Molotov (Commissar of Foreign Affairs) and Yagoda (head of the NKVD) went to Leningrad to personally supervise the investigation and to even take part in the interrogation of the suspect. However, it is highly possible that news of Kirov’s fate was known in the Kremlin, prior to his assassination …
On Stalin’s order
There are many indications that Kirov’s murder was carried out on the orders of Joseph Stalin himself, who longed to get rid of an inconvenient associate. However, he achieved two objectives with this move. He used Kirov’s death as a pretext for the introduction of the “Great Terror” in the Soviet Union. He accused an alleged conspiracy that already existed in Leningrad of the assassination, which he then linked to the persons of Kamenev and Zinoviev – collaborators for whose removal he needed only the slightest pretext. Thus, the Kirov assassination gave rise to the greatest wave of terror in the history of the USSR, directly affecting millions of people.