Sergey Kirov - Assassination and Aftermath

Assassination and Aftermath

The Leningrad office of the NKVD - headed by Kirov’s close friend, Feodor Medved - looked after Kirov’s security. Stalin reportedly ordered the NKVD Commissar, Genrikh Yagoda, to replace Medved with Grigory Yeremeyevich Yevdokimov, a close associate of Stalin. However, Kirov intervened and had the order countermanded. According to Alexander Orlov, Stalin then ordered Yagoda to arrange the assassination. Yagoda ordered Medved’s deputy, Vania Zaporozhets, to undertake the job. Zaporozhets returned to Leningrad in search of an assassin; in reviewing the files he found the name of Leonid Nikolaev.

Leonid Nikolaev was well-known to the NKVD, which had arrested him for various petty offences in recent years. Various accounts of his life agree that he was an expelled Party member and failed junior functionary with a murderous grudge and an indifference towards his own survival. He was unemployed, with a wife and child, and in financial difficulties. According to Orlov, Nikolayev had allegedly expressed to a 'friend' a desire to kill the head of the party control commission that had expelled him. His friend reported this to the NKVD.

Zaporozhets then allegedly enlisted Nikolayev’s 'friend' to contact him, giving him money and a loaded 7.62 mm Nagant M1895 revolver. However, Nikolaev's first attempt at killing Kirov failed. On 15 October 1934, Nikolaev packed his Nagant revolver in a briefcase and entered the Smolny Institute where Kirov worked. Although he was initially passed by the main security desk at Smolny, he was arrested after an alert guard asked to examine his briefcase, which was found to contain the revolver. A few hours later, Nikolayev’s briefcase and loaded revolver were returned to him, and he was told to leave the building. Though Nikolaev had clearly broken Soviet laws, the security police had inexplicably released him from custody; he was even permitted to retain his loaded pistol.

With Stalin's approval, the NKVD had previously withdrawn all but four police bodyguards assigned to Kirov. These four guards accompanied Kirov each day to his offices at the Smolny Institute, and then left. On 1 December 1934, the usual guard post at the entrance to Kirov's offices was left unmanned, even though the building served as the chief offices of the Leningrad party apparatus and as the seat of the local government. According to some reports, only a single friend and unarmed bodyguard of Kirov's, Commissar Borisov, remained. Other sources state that there may have been as many as nine NKVD guards in the building. Whatever the case, given the circumstances of Kirov's death, as former Soviet official and author Alexander Barmine noted, "the negligence of the NKVD in protecting such a high party official was without precedent in the Soviet Union."

On the afternoon of 1 December Nikolaev arrived at the Smolny Institute offices. Unopposed, he made his way to the third floor, where he waited in a hallway until Kirov and Borisov stepped into the corridor. Borisov appears to have stayed well behind Kirov, some 20 to 40 paces (some sources allege Borisov parted company with Kirov in order to prepare his luncheon). As Kirov turned a corner, passing Nikolaev, the latter drew his revolver and shot Kirov in the back of the neck.

The Sergei Kirov Museum maintains that the circumstances of Kirov's death "remain unknown to this day." There are no doubts on the aftermath, however: "the bloodiest round of Stalin's terror and repression."

After Kirov's death, Stalin called for swift punishment of the traitors and those found negligent in Kirov's death. Nikolayev was tried alone and secretly by Vasili Ulrikh, Chairman of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. He was sentenced to death by firing squad on 29 December 1934, and the sentence was carried out that very night.

The hapless Commissar Borisov died the day after the assassination, supposedly by falling from a moving truck while riding with a group of NKVD agents. Borisov’s wife was committed to an insane asylum. According to Orlov, Nikolayev’s mysterious 'friend' and alleged provocateur, who had supplied him with the revolver and money, was later shot on Stalin’s personal orders.

Nikolayev's mother, brother, sisters, cousin and some other people close to him were arrested and later liquidated or sent to labor camps. Arrested immediately after the assassination, Nikolayev's wife Milda Draule survived her husband by three months before being executed herself. Their infant son (who was named Marx following the Bolshevik naming fashion) was sent into an orphanage. Marx Draule was alive in 2005 when he was officially rehabilitated as a victim of political repressions, and Milda was also found innocent retroactively. However, Nikolayev was never posthumously acquitted.

Several NKVD officers from the Leningrad branch were convicted of negligence for not adequately protecting Kirov, and sentenced to prison terms of up to ten years. None of these NKVD officers were executed in the aftermath, and none actually served time in prison. Instead, they were transferred to executive posts in Stalin's labor camps for a period of time (in effect, a demotion). According to Nikita Khrushchev, these same NKVD officers were shot in 1937 during Stalin's purges.

Initially, a Communist Party communiqué reported that Nikolaev had confessed his guilt, not only as an assassin, but an assassin in the pay of a 'fascist power', receiving money from an unidentified 'foreign consul' in Leningrad. 104 defendants who were already in prison at the time of Kirov's assassination and who had no demonstrable connection to Nikolayev were found guilty of complicity in the 'fascist plot' against Kirov, and summarily executed.

However, a few days later, during a subsequent Communist Party meeting of the Moscow District, the Party secretary announced in a speech that Nikolayev was personally interrogated by Stalin the day after the assassination, an unheard-of event for a party leader such as Stalin:

"Comrade Stalin personally directed the investigation of Kirov's assassination. He questioned Nikolayev at length. The leaders of the Opposition placed the gun in Nikolaev's hand!"

Other speakers duly rose to condemn the Opposition: "The Central Committee must be pitiless - the Party must be purged... the record of every member must be scrutinized...." No one at the meeting mentioned the initial theory of fascist agents. Later, Stalin even used the Kirov assassination to eliminate the remainder of the Opposition leadership against him, accusing Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Abram Prigozhin, and others who had stood with Kirov in opposing Stalin (or simply failed to acquiesce to Stalin's views), of being 'morally responsible' for Kirov's murder, and as such were guilty of complicity. All were removed from the Party apparatus and given prison sentences. While serving their sentences, the Opposition leaders were charged with new crimes, for which they were sentenced to death and shot.