Khrushchev Era Politics and the Investigation of the Kirov Murder, 1956-1957
Khrushchev Era Politics and the Investigation of the Kirov Murder, 1956-1957

Summary/Abstract: The assassination of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad party chief, on December 1, 1934, was a political sensation inside and outside the USSR. Although the killer, a disgruntled Communist named Leonid Nikolaev, insisted in early interrogations that he had acted alone, Soviet police could not accept this. In a Soviet culture where even rotten vegetables on store shelves could signal counterrevolutionary sabotage, investigators interpreted the murder as a conspiracy by hostile capitalist powers, internal “class enemies,” or both. Under Stalin’s direction, senior officers of the security police (NKVD/UGB) pinned the blame for the assassination on Stalin’s former rivals in the Communist Party leadership, the so-called “Left” and “Right” oppositionists. Within four weeks of the killing, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced to death Nikolaev and thirteen alleged co-conspirators, almost all of them former members of the so-called “Zinovievite Opposition” in Leningrad. Then in January 1935 Soviet courts convicted Grigorii Zinoviev and one-time ally Lev Kamenev of “moral complicity” in Kirov’s murder, supposedly because they had fostered oppositionist moods within the party. These trials, of the so-called “Leningrad Center” and “Moscow Center” respectively, began a brutal purge of the party leadership.

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