It is difficult to think of a case comparable to the murder of Sergei Mironovich Kirov. Here one of the top leaders of a great country was killed—most probably by the wish of the supreme dictator, the murder being used as full or partial justification for the arrest, torture, exile, or execution of many, then thousands, and finally millions of men and women charged with some guilt relating to that deed. To be sure, there seem to have been other cases where a highly placed Soviet leader was killed, or his death hastened, by Stalin’s initiative, and then posthumously praised or in effect canonized. But none of those cases involved the kind of large-scale false accusation of murder, or conspiracy to murder, that Kirov’s death set off. This episode has a grisly uniqueness.

Such is a possible justification for Conquest’s latest book. He has earned the tide of our premier Kremlinologist, both in terms of his careful methods of handling evidence and the amazing quantity of his publications. Conquest states his opinion of this case in the preface: that “Stalin’s guilt is scarcely in doubt,” but that the final verification and official Soviet condemnation of Stalin for the murder of Kirov (which he expected might precede appearance of the book) would still be welcome.

Kirov, born Kostrikov in the Vyatka region of northern Russia, was studying to be a mechanic in nearby Kazan when he met some radical students from the local university and began to print leaflets for them. Next he spent time in Tomsk in western Siberia, where he joined the Social Democratic Party and was elected to the party committee. Active during the Revolution of 1905, he was arrested and served three years in prison; after his release in 1909 he went to Vladikavkaz in the Caucasus, changed his name to Kirov, and married a girl whose sister was a Bolshevik, when the Bolsheviks organized a party separate from other Social Democrats in 1912, Kirov was among them. In October 1917 he was a delegate from the Caucasus to the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, and then took a leading role in the Bolshevik recapture of the Caucasus, including the savage conquest of independent and democratic Georgia. In 1926 he was named candidate member of the Politburo and became First Secretary of Leningrad’s provincial party committee.

Despite showing occasional signs of moderation, Kirov remained a hardline, tough-minded henchman of Stalin through the ghastly years of collectivization and all-out industrialization from 1929 to 1933. But by February 1934, at the XVII Congress of the Communist Party, the atmosphere of internal struggle and sacrifice was passing. Some highly-placed party members were horrified by what they had seen or knew had been done to the peasantry and wished to dethrone its author; others believed that Stalin had been the best person to lead the violent and merciless campaign that had now slackened, but that a less brutal person, a conciliator, was now needed in the seat of power. A number of leading Communists approached Kirov with a proposal that he replace Stalin as General Secretary—the position that Stalin had made the focal point of the dictatorship. Kirov declined, declaring—quite plausibly—that the entire policy of the party would be thrown into question if such a move was made. Nevertheless, nearly 300 (out of 1,966) delegates at the Congress voted for Kirov and against Stalin even for Central Committee membership (let alone dictator). Stalin, however, would have his revenge; as Khrushchev revealed in his secret speech of 1956, 1,108 out of the 1,966 delegates were later shot.

Stalin, who was aware of the group that opposed his leadership, then asked Kirov to come to Moscow. Kirov refused, and it was agreed that he could remain in Leningrad until 1938. There he remained, the obvious choice for any conspiratorial or democratic effort to replace Stalin. In September 1934, Stalin sent him to Kazakhstan, which had suffered grievously during collectivization, to bring in the harvest; there he had a car accident, which some have thought a first assassination attempt. Kirov attended a plenum of the Central Committee in Moscow in November, returned to Leningrad and was shot on December 1, 1934. The actual assassin was Leonid Nikolayev, an unemployed party member who suffered from both physical and psychological weaknesses. What happened next defies the imagination. Stalin and others immediately went to Leningrad to “investigate.” By March from 60,000 to 100,000 people had been seized and deported from Leningrad, and one did not need to have had the remotest connection with Kirov or the Leningrad leadership to be arrested. Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had been two of the most highly placed Bolsheviks, were arrested, released, rearrested, given a trial in January 1935, sentenced to ten and five years respectively, retried publicly in August 1936, and executed. The Western reaction to the public trial was mixed, but many found it plausible that Zinoviev and Kamenev had connived in the assassination.

The final—or perhaps the penultimate—chapter of this story lies in the gradual but mounting suspicion that the culprit was none of those who had been in the dock, but Stalin himself It was Trotsky (safely abroad until 1940, when one of Stalin’s agents sank an axe into his skull) who first hinted and in October 1936 charged that Stalin was responsible, though he thought Stalin had intended to prevent the deed at the last moment and then proceed against the oppositionists. While Khrushchev came close in his secret speech to labeling Stalin as the guilty party, he drew back, and did not refer to the Kirov murder in his memoirs. Since then Roy Medvedev has declared Stalin’s guilt “almost proved” and Fyodor Burlatsky, writing in a collective volume entitled Proryv (1988), declared outright that Kirov was removed by Stalin. (The English translation, Breakthrough, published in New York by Walker, has merely that Kirov and others “were executed” without saying by whom.)

Reviewing Ulam’s novel in The New Republic (July 18, 1988), Walter Laqueur writes that the search for a motive for the killing by Stalin is “not likely to lead to any conclusive truth,” since Stalin later killed many of his allies and supporters. I do not find this logic compelling. Stalin thought he faced a possibly imminent danger of being replaced by Kirov and wanted him out of the way—on that there can be no doubt. That he thereupon sought to arrange the murder of his possible rival and succeeded in so doing seems almost as certain. Perhaps the Soviets will offer us certainty in the months and years to come. In the meantime. Conquest has given us all of the story at present available, and he has done so objectively, fairly, and carefully.

Treadgold_Review

[Stalin and the Kirov Murder, by Robert Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press) 164 pp., $16.95]