The Murder of Sergei Kirov - Introduction
Those who have access and can afford the book should buy it for the support .
If not all, most anti communist books are funded by large foundations of monopoly capitalists and by imperialist government's NGOs. These falsifications, slanders, lies are widely translated and made available to the largest readers. It is vitally important task to translate and make the books and writings of Grover Furr available and accessible to the readers.
Introduction.
The basic facts have never been seriously disputed. At about 4:30 p.m. on December 1, 1934 Sergei Mironovich Kirov, First Secretary of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)1 of Leningrad oblast' (province) and city, entered the Smolny Institute, headquarters of the Bolshevik Party. Kirov mounted the stairs and walked along the corridor of the third floor towards his office. Leonid Vasil'evich Nikolaev, an unemployed Party member, was standing in the hallway. Nikolaev allowed Kirov to pass by and then rushed towards him from behind, took out a pistol, and shot Kirov in the back of the skull. Nikolaev then tried to shoot himself in the head but missed and fell in a faint on the floor a few feet from Kirov's body.
Nikolaev was seized on the spot. From this point on there is little agreement.
Either late that night or sometime the next day his interrogations began. At first Nikolaev seems to have claimed that he had killed Kirov on his own, without any accomplices, in order to draw attention to what he felt was unfair treatment of himself. Within two or three days he began to, hint that others were involved. Before a week was out Nikolaev had admitted that he was part of a conspiracy by a clandestine group of Party members opposed to Joseph Stalin and favoring Grigorii Zinoviev, Leningrad First Secretary before Kirov.
NKVD investigators now turned their attention on this group. Interrogations of those Nikolaev had named, and then of the persons named by those men, led to a number of partial and a few fuller confessions. Three weeks after the murder fourteen men were indicted for conspiracy to kill Kirov. They were tried on December 28-29, convicted, and executed immediately. Meanwhile, Nikolaev's brother Piotr and wife Mil'da Draule had made more and more self-incriminating confessions. In March 1935 Draule was tried, convicted, and executed.
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The larger significance of the Kirov murder unfolded only gradually during the next three years. The threads that bound the Kirov conspirators to Zinoviev and Kamenev, followed up by NKVD investigators, led to the three Moscow "Show Trials" of 1936, 1937 and 1938, and to the trial of the military commanders known as the ''Tukhachevsky Affair" of 1937. This last led in turn to the "Ezhovshchina", also known as the "Great Terror" of 1937-1938, during which some hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, most certainly innocent, were arrested and executed, with many others being imprisoned.
On March 5, 1953 Joseph Stalin died. Within months Nikita Khrushchev had become the most powerful leader of the Soviet Union. Before Stalin had been dead many months Khrushchev began organizing a campaign to attack Stalin. A major part of this effort was to declare that Stalin had fabricated false cases against all the defendants of the Moscow Trials and Tukhachevsky Affair.
Khrushchev hinted at these things in his famous "Secret Speech" of Feb-ruary 25, 1956. In the same speech he also cast doubt on the official version of the Kirov assassination. Within the party leadership Khrushchev and his men promoted the "rehabilitations" of a great many persons who had been executed during the 1930s, including some of the Moscow Trial defendants. Khrushchev and his men tried hard to find any evidence they could to prove that Stalin had been behind Kirov's murder. But they were unable to do so, and so at length settled for a story that Nikolaev had acted on his own.
The version that Stalin had caused Kirov to be killed continued to circulate, becoming widely believed both inside and outside the Soviet Union. Outside Russia the "Stalin did it'' version continued for a while thanks to books by two well-known anticommunist writers: Robert Conquest, who wrote Stalin and the Kirov Murder in 1989, and Amy Knight, author of Who Killed Kirov? (199T). Both these works rely heavily on rumors and hearsay.
During the Gorbachev period another attempt was made by highly-placed Party officials to promote the view that Stalin had killed Kirov. This attempt also failed due to the utter lack of evidence to support it. Since 1990 the view officially accepted in Russia has been that Nikolaev acted alone, and that Stalin "used" Kirov's murder to frame former or putative rivals, forcing them to admit to crimes they had never commit-ted, and executing them and, ultimately, many thousands more.
In 1993 Alla Kirilina's book Rikoshet appeared. Kirilina was long the head of the Kirov Museum in Leningrad, an official government position that gave her great familiarity with Kirov, his life and his death. This study contains references to a modest number of primary sources and even reprints a few of them. In 2001 this book was republished as the third part of Kirilina's much longer study NeiZJJestnyi Kirov ("'Ibe Unknown Kirov").
In the Fall of 2010 American historian Matthew Lenoe published The Kirov Murder and Soviet History, a mammoth 800-page work under the aegis of the prestigious Yale University Press series "Annals of Communism." While Lenoe acknowledges his debt to Kirilina's work, his book is much longer, with many more references to primary sources. While Kirilina's book is more discursive in nature Lenoe's is, or appears to be, evidence-based. It contains translations, complete or partial, of 127 documents. A number of these are primary sources for the Kirov murder investigation.
The Problem
Both Kirilina's and Lenoe's books contain evidence - the texts of many primary documents and references to yet others. Both arrive at the same conclusion: that Kirov's assassin Nikolaev was a ''lone gunman" and that everyone else accused of complicity in the murder was "framed", falsely accused, forced to give false confessions incriminating themselves and others.
If Kirilina's book, or the more recent and much more detailed work by Lenoe, had solved the Kirov murder the present study would be largely superfluous. But any attentive reader will notice immediately that neither Kirilina nor Lenoe proves this case at all. Though they cite a large num-ber of primary sources only two of those documents in any way support the hypothesis that Nikolaev was a "lone gunman". There are serious problems with both of these documents. All of the other primary docu-ments support the original conclusion reached at the time by the Soviet investigators of the NKVD, the Soviet prosecution, and the court: that Nikolaev was part of a clandestine Zinovievite terrorist conspiracy linked with other similar conspiratorial groups.
In the present study our goal has been to solve the Kirov murder case. Towards this end we review all the evidence as objectively as possible, with appropriate skepticism, and without any preconceived conclusion in mind. The main conclusion of our study is that Nikolaev was not a "lone gunman" at all. The Soviet investigators and prosecution got it right in December 1934. A clandestine Zinovievite conspiratorial organization, of which Nikolaev was a member, killed Kirov.
The only sensible way to approach the Kirov murder is to begin with Kirilina's and Lenoe's studies. These two books set forth the present state of research on this question. Each contains much valuable evidentiary material that any future student must take fully into account. We study each of these works with great care, Kirilina's in one chapter, Lenoe's far longer and more ambitious work in several chapters. We ex-pose in detail the very considerable - ultimately, fatal - flaws in each of them.
It is our conclusion that both authors began with the preconceived idea that is also the official position of the Russian government today, as it was of the Gorbachev regime that preceded it: that Nikolaev alone was guilty and everyone else was "framed." This conclusion is contradicted by virtually all the evidence, as our careful study of that evidence shows. We examine and reveal the errors Kirilina and Lenoe make in reaching their erroneous conclusion, exposing their faulty reasoning and use of primary sources.
We also draw upon much evidence that is directly relevant to the Kirov case but that neither Kirilina nor Lenoe used. It may not be coincidental that all of this evidence supports the hypothesis that Nikolaev was part of a Zinovievite conspiracy - that is, the conclusion drawn by the Soviet prosecution and courts in the 1930s.
We do not try to account for the fact that Kirilina and Lenoe make a large number of faulty suppositions, errors of reasoning and argumentation, and omissions in their consideration of relevant evidence. It is hard to imagine that these scholars made so many flagrant errors without noticing them - that is, it is hard to believe that some of them were not made deliberately to attempt to force their conclusions to "fit'' the preconceived "official" conclusion that only Nikolaev was guilty.
However, it is easy to underestimate the power of a well-established, privileged preconceived framework of analysis on the minds of any re-searcher who is himself seriously biased. The pressures, both psychological and academic, to reach a conclusion acceptable to leading figures in the field of Soviet history, as well as to officials in Russia who control access to archives, are considerable indeed. Consequently, the disadvantages, professionally and otherwise, of reaching a conclusion that, no matter how well demonstrated, will be displeasing to powerful forces in the archival, political, and academic communities, are clear to anyone who is familiar with the highly politicized nature of the field of Soviet and indeed of all of communist history.
We devote a great deal of attention to analyzing and detailing the defects in Kirilina's and Lenoe's research. We devote special attention to the cru-cial parts of Kirilina's and Lenoe's arguments - to Nikolaev's "first confession" and, in the case of Lenoe, to Genrikh Liushkov's article in the Japanese magazine Kaizo of 1939. This is essential in order to "clear the field" - to establish that these, the most authoritative works on this problem, have failed to solve the question of Kirov's murder. Our task is simi-lar to that of an architect who, called to inspect a structure, discovers that its construction down to the very foundation is so faulty that the entire edifice must be razed and a sound structure erected in its stead. Once we establish that neither Kirilina's nor Lenoe's studies are adequate and that any objective study of the Kirov murder must begin again from the be-ginning, we proceed to do so.
A problem that confronts everyone interested in the Kirov assassination is that the Russian government continues to keep top-secret many, perhaps most, of the investigative materials for the Kirov murder, as well as t:or the subsequent and related investigations into the Kremlin Affair, the three Moscow "show trials", and the Tukhachevsky Affair. In Russia there is a statutory 75-year limit upon the expiration of which documents are supposed to be declassified and made public. Many documents from the 1930s have indeed been made public. But most of the investigative materials related to all of these alleged conspiracies are still classified, unavailable even to trusted scholars. Nevertheless, so many primary sources have been published over the past 20 years that, we argue, we have enough evidence to resolve the matter of the Kirov murder in a definitive manner.
Implications
In his informative discussion of Khrushchev's campaign to "rehabilitate" those convicted of complicity in Kirov's murder Lenoe correctly situates the Kirov case at the foundation of the conspiracy trials of the 1930s in the Soviet Union as follows:
If the official charges in the first two trials - that former Zinoviev supporters had conspired to murder Kirov -were entirely bogus, then the indictments in all of the succeeding show trials collapsed .... But if there was some truth to the charge that Zinovievites conspired to kill Kirov, then that preserved the possibility of arguing that the latter charges were also valid, at least in part. (591-2)
Lenoe understands the implications of the Kirov case. Khrushchev aimed to debunk the then-canonical narrative of Soviet history during the 1930s and create a new one out of whole cloth, one in which Stalin was the criminal who had framed and executed a great many innocent Party members. In order to construct this new narrative he had to begin by completely rewriting the Kirov case.
Lenoe goes on to cite some of the falsehoods invented by Khrushchev and his men in order to persuade the more pro-Stalin members of the Party Presidium that all those convicted of guilt in Kirov's murder save Nikolaev had been innocent, "framed." But as we shall show Lenoe is still far too credulous of Khrushchev's lies. According to Lenoe even though Khrushchev and his men had concealed much evidence, destroyed other evidence, and generally lied in their study, they were basically correct in concluding in a secret report that Nikolaev had acted alone.
Khrushchev realized that the complete rewriting of Soviet history he wanted necessitated a reversal of verdicts in the Kirov case. And the re-verse is also true. To reinstate the original verdict against the defendants in the December 1934 Kirov trial implies that the defendants in the conspiracy cases that followed it: the Moscow Center trial of January 1935, the Kremlin Affair of 1935, the three Moscow "show" trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938, and the Tukhachevsky Affair trial of June 1937, might well have been guilty. Since the testimony in all three "show'' trials and in the Tukhachevsky Affair trial implicated Leon Trotsky, it raises the possibility that Trotsky might have been guilty too. Likewise it suggests that other party leaders tried and executed in non-public trials might be guilty as well.
In short, the whole post-Khrushchev paradigm of Soviet history that we have called, for short, the "anti-Stalin" paradigm 2, is in play in the Kirov murder, many of its mainstay "facts" uncertain, questionable, or bogus. This would entail a reassessment of one of the major historical figures of the 20th century, Joseph Stalin, and consequently of the entire history of the Soviet Union, in which Stalin and the period of his sway is pivotal.
2 See Grover Furr and Vladimir L. Bobrov, "Stephen Cohen's Biography of Bukharin: A
Study in the Falsehood of Khrushchev-Era 'Revelations"'. C11/t11ral Log ic 2010, page 5. At http://dogic.eserver.org/2010/Furr.pdf
A "paradigm shift" of this magnitude would disturb any academic discipline. Arguably, it would be especially threatening in such an overtly politically-charged field as the study of communism, of which Soviet history is inevitably a vital part. Perhaps it is not surprising that few scholars wish to squarely face the prospect of coming down on the side of such a change. As we discuss in this study Lenoe spends several pages of his Introduction assuring his readers that he is steadfastly anticommunist and anti-Stalin even though he concludes that Stalin "didn't do it" - did not have Kirov assassinated.
The fact that Lenoe felt the need to publish what might be called a statement of his "political reliability'' just because he has concluded that the evidence shows Stalin did not commit a certain crime of which others had suspected him, and despite the fact that both the Gorbachev-led Soviet regime and the Russian government since then had long concurred in this assessment, attests to the charged political and moral aura surrounding virtually every question of Soviet history during the Stalin period.
The Kirov murder case is one of a small number of cardinal and there-fore "hot-button" issues in Soviet history. Others include the Moscow Trials, the Ezhovshchina, or "bad time of Ezhov" of 1937-1938 (also known, in Cold-War terminology, as "the Great Terror"), and Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" to the 20th Party Congress in 1956. All of these events are crucially linked to the Kirov affair. Of course there are other pivotal events in the Soviet history of this period too, such as col-lectivization, the famine of 1932-33, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and the Katyn Forest massacre, that are not immediately linked to the Kirov Affair except insofar as they all involve the Stalin leadership. Nevertheless the Kirov murder is fundamental to our understanding of both elite and mass politics of the 1930s in the USSR, and in fact to the fate of so-cialism itself.
The notion that Kirov was killed by a "lone gunman" and hence that Stalin framed all the rest of those accused of complicity and conspiracy is a foundational part of the anti-Stalin paradigm . This in turn means that many people - some of them powerful in academia and even in politics and the media - will be displeased at any research that calls this paradigm into serious question, regardless of the evidentiary basis of that research. The historical legitimacy not only of Russia but of the other post-Soviet states is constructed upon the demonization of the Stalin period and upon certain foundational events that are referenced to justify that de-monization. Ideological anticommunism, always avidly promoted for obvious reasons by powerful capitalist forces, is also tied to a very negative interpretation of all communist movements, and especially that of Stalin.
It should surprise no one that scholars are wary of reaching conclusions that will prove unpopular in important circles. Powerful academic, economic, media, and other influential elites are strongly predisposed to favor negative historical portrayals of Stalin and the Soviet Union of his day. Meanwhile, there are no corresponding powerful interests that might look with equanimity, much less with favor, upon more positive interpretations. Nor do any powerful institutions exist to promote objective re-search to discover the truth by the best methods "and let the chips fall where they may."
Viewed from this perspective it is perhaps less surprising than it might otherwise be that until the present study no researcher has ever approached the primary source evidence in the Kirov murder case in a spirit of objectivity and decided the matter as though it were just another his-torical problem, albeit a fascinating one. Whatever their reasons, however, neither Kirilina nor Lenoe have done so. The evidence they them-selves cite - to say nothing of the very large amount of primary source evidence that they unquestionably know about but have simply omitted -is sufficient to prove that their conclusions are incorrect. On the evidence there can simply be no doubt that Kirov was killed as a result of a conspiracy of clandestine terrorist Zinovievites.
Our Analysis
This study begins by reviewing in detail the three most recent scholarly studies of the Kirov affair: by Kirilina, Lenoe, and the Norwegian historian Asmund Egge. These are the only books whose authors gained access to and drew upon many primary sources. No study of the Kirov affair betore Kirilina's was able to use the primary sources that have been made public since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. Kirilina's study, titled Rikoshet ("ricochet'') was republished in 2001 as the final part of her much longer book NeiZPeSf1!Ji Kirov. (As the head for many years of the Kirov museum in Leningrad - St. Petersburg Kirilina resisted the attempt to reduce Kirov to the question of his murder.) We will use this edition rather than the first 1993 version because it is the more recent one.
We devote much more attention to Lenoe's 2010 study because it is far more recent still and, in addition, much fuller. Lenoe translates either in whole or, usually, in part, a number of importan primary documents. Lenoe also explicitly draws upon Kirilina's book. His is both the most recent and the most authoritative study of the Kirov murder to date. As we shall show, Lenoe's study is also very seriously flawed. Nevertheless, because of Lenoe's unprecedented access to primary source materials and the sheer length of his study, any reconsideration of the Kirov murder has to begin with a detailed critique of Lenoe's account. We devote several chapters to it.
Egge's book, published in Norway in 2009 and in Russia in 2011, has been anointed by the Boris Eltsin Foundation's "History of Stalinism" series. In many respects the most disappointing of the three, it does cite documents not mentioned by either Kirilina or Lenoe, a fact whose implications we explore. We devote a separate chapter to it as well.3
1 Egge and Lenoe were apparently unaware of each other's work and do not reference each other. Both cite Kirilina.
We also devote several chapters to a detailed study of a number of especially crucial primary sources. Some, like Nikolaev's first interrogation, are also examined by both Kirilina and Lenoe. Others, such as Genrikh Liushkov's article in the March 1939 issue of the Japanese magazine Kai-zo, are studied only by Lenoe. We also examine a large third group of very important evidentiary documents that constitute critical evidence in the Kirov murder and yet were ignored by Kirilina, Lenoe, and Egge.
In a concluding chapter we outline what we see as the major conclusion and its implications: that the version of the Kirov murder gradually uncovered by Soviet investigators in the December 1934 and January 1935 trials, the Kremlin Affair interrogations (we do not have any trial records in this case), and the pretrial and trial materials of the 1936, 1937, and 1938 Moscow "show trials", is basically accurate. The conspiracies alleged at these trials did exist, and Kirov was murdered as a part of them. We explore, as space permits, some of the implications of our conclusions, which contradicts - indeed, overturns - the scholarly consensus since Khrushchev's day both inside and outside the USSR and post-Soviet Russia.
We fully realize that this conclusion will be deeply displeasing, even unacceptable, to some scholars in the highly-politicized fields of Soviet and communist history. Nevertheless, given the evidence we have it is the only objective conclusion possible. This study of the Kirov murder is one f a number of recent studies that tend to dismantle the "anti-Stalin" paradigm on purely evidentiary bases. We conclude that a new history of the Soviet Union during Stalin's time, one dramatically different from the version current since Khrushchev's day, is in the process of replacing the "anti-Stalin" paradigm .
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