The assassination of Sergei Kirov on Dec. 1, 1934—despite the fact that he was considered a leading light of the young USSR—was a bellwether for Stalin’s extensive purges that came later.
Revolutions eat their own children, the saying goes. This was certainly true in the case of the Russian Revolution which produced the world’s first communist state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Few of those who led the revolution survived to old age, most often falling victim to their fellow Bolsheviks.
Kirov, born in 1886, had paid his dues as a revolutionary in his youth, taking part in the 1905 uprising and being arrested several times for distributing propaganda. He had backed Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik faction in the Russian Civil War as a commissar in the Caucasus, where he became friendly with Joseph Stalin. He had been named Communist Party chief in Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg) in 1926 and was very popular with party insiders, rising to membership in the Politburo’s inner circles. He had a reputation as an effective administrator, willing to use ruthless methods; under his direction the Baltic-White Sea Canal was finished successfully, but at a cost of the lives of tens of thousands of slave labourers.
Kirov was a supporter of Lenin’s successor, Stalin, and backed him in intra-party fights with the factions led by Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev, who had opposed Stalin in his rise to supreme power. However, Kirov’s growing renown made the paranoid Stalin suspicious, especially when Kirov received more votes for the Central Committee than he did. When Kirov looked to be favouring a relaxation of some of the dictator’s harsher economic policies, his fate was sealed. Stalin ordered him assassinated.
The choice of murderer fell on disgruntled misfit Leonid Nikolayev, who was given money and a pistol by the secret police. Most of Kirov’s security detail was reassigned and the entrance to his offices were left unguarded. On Dec. 1, Nikolayev shot and killed Kirov.
Blaming fascist opponents of communism and plotters inside the party, Stalin ordered swift retribution. He had studied recent German events with great interest. He saw how the Reichstag fire was blamed on communists and allowed Adolf Hitler to assume dictatorial powers. He also saw how Hitler’s murder of Ernst Roehm and his Brownshirts in the “Night of the Long Knives” had cleansed the Nazi Party of internal dissidents. Stalin’s disastrous agricultural collectivization had starved millions while his concentration on heavy industry instead of consumer welfare had led to widespread popular discontent. The murder of Kirov, he calculated, would allow him to acquire unchallenged power and purge the party of those who opposed him and his methods.
Nikolayev was swiftly executed, followed by most of his family. Prisoners, already under arrest, were deemed to be part of this international plot, and were exterminated, as were any officials involved in arranging the murder. But these were just the start. Stalin used the killing to eliminate high-ranking Bolsheviks whom he deemed to be standing in his way. Leaders of the 1917 revolution like Kamenev and Zinoviev—men who had been prominent revolutionaries at Lenin’s side and had held high-ranking positions in the USSR—were expelled from the party and later executed after show trials.
These massively publicized trials riveted world attention as accused after accused went before microphones to confess that, despite their seeming years of service to the Russian revolutionary cause, they had secretly been in the pay of foreign intelligence services or allies of Leon Trotsky, bent on bringing down the party and wrecking the hopes of the oppressed peoples of the world.
Old Bolsheviks who had worked against the Tsar and had suffered imprisonment or Siberian exile, men with genuine revolutionary credentials that might outshine Stalin’s, were particularly hard hit. Beaten down by months of torture, threats to their families, and promises of mercy, they made astonishing claims of having plotted to assassinate Lenin during the Revolution, of sabotaging the Soviet economy, or of conspiring with British, German, and Japanese governments to dismantle the USSR. Their confessions were in vain. After the trials they and their families were executed anyway (as, in the end, were the secret police chiefs who had carried out the purges).
Overall, the purges of the 1930s took at least a million lives, sent millions more into concentration camps of the GULAG or internal exile, and eviscerated the highest levels of the party and military. Its effect on technicians and management undoubtedly set back Soviet industry while the murders of the officer class left the Red Army shockingly ineffective in its Winter War with Finland and the German invasion of 1941. The effect on foreign communists was mixed—some lost their faith in the cause while others clung even harder to their faith in Stalin.
