The Murder of Sergei Kirov - Kirilina
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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.
Chapter 1.
Kirilina.
In his introductory chapter Lenoe states that his "greatest debt is to Alla Kirilina, the most knowledgeable scholar in the world on Kirov's killing." (Lenoe 15) The long-time head of the Kirov Museum in Leningrad / St. Petersburg, Kirilina's most recent work on the Kirov murder is Neizyestnyi Kirov ("The Unknown Kirov'') (2001). The third part of this work, "Riko-shet" (also the title of an earlier book by Kirilina) is Kirilina's discussion of the assassination, investigation, trial, and aftermath. In it Kirilina ex-pounds the view of the murder implied in her clever title: that Nikolaev was a "lone gunman" and the bullet that killed Kirov "ricocheted" to kill many others.
Kirilina wrote her study before the release of many of the evidentiary materials that we now have and that Lenoe and E gge cite. Apparently even her position as director of the Kirov Museum did not gain her access to these materials, let alone to those that have still not been declassi-fied. For our present purposes Kirilina's study of Kirov's murder and its aftermath is important mainly because E gge and, especially, Lenoe admit they drew heavily on it. We will examine Kirilina's "Rikoshet'' in two re-spects. First we will demonstrate that Kirilina has not solved - indeed, it seems she has not even attempted to solve - Kirov's murder. We will then point out some important facts that Kirilina reveals and that Lenoe has omitted or suppressed, matters missing from Lenoe's much longer study.
Since Khrushchev's day, and especially since the later Gorbachev period, the official Soviet and Russian view of the Kirov assassination is that the assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, was a "lone gunman". Kirilina, Lenoe, Egge, and virtually all other "mainstream" scholars of Soviet history have ad-opted this "official" position, the implication of which is that the Moscow Trials were fabrications or falsifications and the defendants inn0; cent, unjustly executed by Stalin. In the present study we show that there is no evidence at all for this position, and a huge amount of evidence against it. It would appear that anticommunist scholars have embraced it for ideological reasons alone.
Kirilina begins with the assumption, all but universal among mainstream historians of the Soviet period, that the Moscow trials were frameups, "falsifications." (205) The problem with this assumption is that it basi-cally predetermines the rest of Kirilina's study. The Kirov murder figured prominently in all three of the public Moscow "show" trials of 1936, 1937 and 1938. If the Moscow Trials are declared to have been frameups of innocent men, no one remains as an accomplice or accessory to Ni-kolaev's act. Since no one seriously believes any longer that Stalin had Kirov killed, the only remaining possibility permitted by the assumption that the trials were falsifications is that Nikolaev must have acted alone.
In short Kirilina "begs the question" of Kirov's assassination. She does not pose a hypothesis and then set out to determine whether the available evidence supports that hypothesis or another one. Rather, she assumes from the outset that Nikolaev acted alone. As we shall demonstrate, Lenoe and Egge do this as well. Like them Kirilina cites a lot of evidence to which she was the first scholar to have access. This evidence is very interesting and important. Moreover, it does not at all support her pre-conceived conclusion.
We will briefly examine some examples of what appears to be incompe-tence in Kirilina's book. We will also identify some statements that ap-pear to be intentionally false. Of course, some form of prevarication is essential in a work such as Kirilina's - one that presents itself to its readers as an attempt to discover the truth, to "solve the crime", but instead presents a biased argument in favor of a preconceived conclusion.
Moreover, when that preconceived conclusion runs counter to virtually all the evidence we have - and we have a great deal of evidence concern-ing Kirov's death - an author determined to deny this fact and to pro-mote instead a version of events which is contradicted by the evidence at every tum may be compelled to employ transparent means in her attempt to disguise the truth. What appears to the objective reader as incompe-tence may well be instead (or also), like the deliberate falsehoods, an at-tempt to persuade and deceive rather than genuine ignorance or incompetence.
Incompetence
Like Lenoe, whose work we shall examine later, Kirilina makes a number of careless errors:
* She reports a newspaper account that claims Andrei YA. Vyshinskii, prosecutor in the Moscow Trials and assistant prosecutor in the Kirov trial of December 1934, believed that "confession is the queen of evidence" (219):
The newspaper "Moskovskii Komsomolets in St. Petersburg", in its issue of 6-13 December 2000, published a short notice on the Kirov murder. It questions whether it was Nikolaev who murdered Kirov and argues that at the foundation of Nikolaev's confession is the incorrect conceptual position of A. Ia. Vyshinski, at that time Prosecutor General of the USSR, who considered that "confession is the queen of all evidence" ...
This canard has long since been refuted. Vyshinskii's speech to the Feb-ruary-March 1937 Central Committee Plenum, published in 1995 (Vopro[J Istorii .N!t2, 1995, p. 11), specifically attacks the notion of relying upon confessions instead of other evidence. In his later work, The Theory of Trial Evidence in Soviet Law (Moscow 1946) Vyshinskii criticizes the fact that confession, even when obtained under "torture" (pytkz), was con-sidered "queen of proofs" in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe.
The methods of "proof" were also extremely simple and unique. The most reliable means of "proving'' was the use of physical suffering, torture, under the blows of which it was easy to obtain the defendant's own confession, which was considered to be "the best evidence in the world", "the queen of evidence." 4
Though Kirilina is critical of the other assertions in this article she never points out the author's (Bastrykin's) error in falsely attributing to Vyshinskii what in fact he strongly opposed.
* On p. 342 Kirilina states:
I note that it was Iagoda who first uttered these words at the trial of the Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites in 1938:
"Zaporozfaets released Nikolaev at my direction."
The text of the trial not only shows that Iagoda never uttered these words but that, on the contrary, Iagoda specifically denied doing any such thing! lagoda stated in pre-trial interrogations available to Kirilina that he was informed of Nikolaev's release only after the fact. We discuss this issue in detail in another chapter of the present work.
* On pp. 342-3 Kirilina again insists:
Zaporozhets had no connection at all to the release of Nikolaev on October 15 [1934].
citing as her evidence Khrushchev-era witness Anshukov, who testified that Zaporozhets was in the hospital in a cast.
But Iagoda had never claimed that Zaporozhets was in Leningrad at the time of Nikolaev's detention on October 15, 1934. On the contrary, in his pretrial interrogation of May 19, 193 7 Iagoda stated "I personally did not give any directives about getting rid of Borisov. Zaporozhets was not in Leningrad at all at that time." 5 5 Genrikh Jagoda. Narko,n lll!Jfrmnikh de/ SSR. Genera/'1!Ji komissar gos11darstve1111oi bezopasnosti. Sbornik dok11111entov. Kazan', 1997, p. 184.
In this same interrogation Iagoda testi-fied that he learned about the upcoming attempt to assassinate Kirov from Enukidze after a conference of the conspiracy, the Right-Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc, in the summer of 1934. Then, in Iagoda's words:
Answer: I summoned Zaporozhets (assistant head of the Political Division) from Leningrad, informed him about the possibility of an attempt on Kirov's life, and instructed him not to stand in its way. (181)
[ ... ]
Answer: Zaporozhets told me about this a little while after Nikolaev had been released.
Question: What did he tell you?
Answer: Zaporozhets was in Moscow, came to see me, and related how in Leningrad a certain Nikolaev, who had been watching Kirov's automobile, had been detained by personnel of the Operations Division. He was brought to the Political Division and upon being searched in the presence of Gubin there were found materials that constituted evidence of terrorist intent. Gubin reported this to him and Zaporozhets released Nikolaev. (183)
So Jagoda never claimed that Zaporozhets was in Leningrad when Ni-kolaev was detained on October 15. The volume Genrikh Jagoda was pub-lished in 1997; Kirilina's book Neizvestf!)'i Kirov was published four years later, in 2001. Kirilina had ample time to consult the former volume and see that Anshukov's statement did not contradict Iagoda's testimony. But she failed to do so.
* Kirilina notes that under the law of December 1, 1934, terrorist cases were to be tried without defense attorneys or the right of appeal. She then notes that at the August 1936 Moscow Trial defense attorneys were indeed permitted, but appeals were not allowed.
By order of the CEC of December 1, 1934 cases involving terrorists were to be conducted without defense attorneys, behind closed doors, and without the right of appeal. At the 1936 Moscow trial there were both defense attorneys and a public. Perhaps this departure from the order and providing the defendants with the right to appeal the sentence were a "guarantee" of Stalin's in collusion with the defendants?
In this case they did not allow the defendants this right.
On the night of August 23-24 1936 the court announced its sentence and that same night they were taken straight from the courtroom to be shot. (Kirilina 369)
This is false. The post-trial appeals of a number of the 1936 trial defend-ants, including Zinoviev, Kamenev, I.N. Smirnov, and Natan Lur'e, were published on page three of the newspaper Izyestiia of September 2, 1992, years before Kirilina's book was published. Kirilina had no excuse for stating that the right of appeal was denied to these defendants. Either
Kirilina invented this "fact'' or copied it uncritically from some other source.
Falsehoods
In addition to errors such as those above that might plausibly be laid to carelessness Kirilina makes many statements that are more accurately described as "deliberately deceptive" or "falsehoods". All are attempts to deemphasize or discount evidence that supports the existence of a conspiracy involving Nikolaev.
Kirilina notes that in his interrogation of December 6, 1934 Nikolaev
... at first confessed that Kotolynov and Shatskii were participants in the "Terrorist act", but failed to cite a single bit of specific evidence in confirmation of this statement. (Kirilina 277)
By "specific (literally, "concrete") evidence" Kirilina evidently means "material evidence" of some kind. In support of this statement she cites IU. Sedov's article ''Wrongfully executed" ("Bezvinno kaznennye") in the journal Trud of December 4 1990. But even Sedov did not demand "spe-cific evidence" from a person giving a jailhouse confession.
Kirilina's demand for "concrete evidence" (konkretnoe dokazatel'stva) is dishonest. Does she really expect that Nikolaev would have carried around a piece of paper signed by Kotolynov and Shatskii in which they agreed to take part in Kirov's assassination? The phrase
... but failed to cite a single bit of specific evidence in confirmation of this statement
is a "tell" - a sign that Kirilina is all too conscious of the weakness of her case, an attempt to dismiss evidence that disproves her own hypothesis.6
6 A "tell" (short for "telegraph") is an unconscious gesture or expression by which a poker player gives a sign to other players whether his hand is good or bad. This makes it impossible to "bluff'' his opponents, an essential skill in poker.
A few pages later Kirilina refers to an interrogation of Nikolaev of December 20, 1934, during which Nikolaev claimed he had approached the the Latvian consul in Leningrad both for money and to ask him to make contact with Trotsky on behalf of their group. Kirilina says that this is "not supported by any documents." This is yet another "tell" - as though the imprisoned Nikolaev would have documents either on his person or, anywhere at all attesting to this. (280) However, this statement of Ni-kolaev's is an interesting one and begs further consideration. We will examine it in a later chapter.
* According to Kirilina Nikolaev stated in a confession of December 4 1934 that
"he was a member of an underground counterrevolutionary organization", that its "participants adhered to the platform of the Trotskyist-Zinovievist bloc". ''The former opposition had their own specific accounts to settle with Kirov in connection with the struggle which he had organized against the Leningrad oppositionists." (281)
We have known since the early 1980s from Trotsky's own pen that a real "Right-Trotskyist bloc" involving Zinoviev and Kamenev did in fact exist.
Kirilina states:
By the way, none of those who confessed about the "Leningrad center" named with Nikolaev or Shatski among its members. (283)This is simply false. In the text of the December 12 interrogation of Zvezdov in Lenoe's book we read:
Question: Lay out for us the membership of the Center and the other branches of the Leningrad organization.
Answer: The membership is as follows:
1. The Leningrad Center:
a. Rumiantsev, Vladimir - head of the organization.
b. Kotolynov, Ivan.
c. Tsarkov, Nikolai.
[ ... ]
h. Nikolaev, Leonid. (Lenoe 310)
Three of those arrested and tried alongside Nikolaev for Kirov's murder - Levin, Sositskii, and Miasnikov - were Trotskyites. (Kirilina 290). Lenoe admits as much in his treatment of the incident, even pointing out that there is some evidence the Latvian consul, Bissenieks, did in fact give some money to Nikolaev. Bissenieks never denied meeting with Ni-kolaev. (Lenoe 382-3) Moreover, Nikolaev talked the language of the opposition. We know that some others_ arrested in connection with the case, like Evdokimov and Gorshenin, did as well. Kotolynov and others in the Zinovievite group were briefly expelled from the Party in 1927 for "Trotskyite" activity.? It would have been natural for lower-level con-spirators to seek a connection with Trotsky.
As Kirilina notes, the NKVD also did not consider the evidence of a "Trotsky connection" firm at that time (291). But Nikolaev's claiming to have asked to be connected with Trotsky would naturally.have appeared to them as worth pursuing. Investigators are trained to follow up every possible avenue of inquiry. And it is certainly not evidence against the ex-istence of a conspiracy!
Concerning the August 1936 "Zinoviev-Kamenev" trial Kirilina states that there was no material evidence:
Once again, not a single document, not a single piece of material evidence, not a single outside witness was brought forward at the trial. The whole indictment was built exclusively on the self-incrimination of the accused ... (367)
Then on pages 368-9 Kirilina juxtaposes passages from the January 1935 trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev to some passages from the transcript of the August 1936 trial. Although Kirilina does not acknowledged it this section of her book is taken directly from Trotsky's "Bulletin of the Op-position" No. 52 of October, 19361 Kirilina even copies word for word Trotsky's claim that
... not a single document, not a single piece of material evidence, was brought forward at the trial. (367)
However, Trotsky proceeded to admit that the Honduran passport of V. Ol'berg, with which he entered the USSR illegally and which was, in his testimony, obtained with the aid of German Trotskyists, did constitute a piece of "material evidence." Kirilina conceals this part of Trotsky's statement from her readers, thereby deceiving them, for at least this one piece of "material evidence" was presented at the trial.
Furthermore, we know that Trotsky himself was deceiving his readership in this discussion of the August 1936 Moscow Trial, as he had done in his discussion of the Kirov murder in No. 41 of the "Bulletin of the Op-position". For Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov discussed between them-selves the "bloc" of Trotskyites, Zinovievites and others. This bloc was indeed formed in 1932, just as stated in the testimony in the August 1936 Moscow Trial. Sedov informed his father that Zinoviev and Kamenev were indeed a part of the bloc. We will discuss this issue in another chap-ter.
All this Trotsky and his son denied in public. This was natural enough -in fact necessary, if they were to preserve their underground conspiracy within the USSR But this information about the bloc was discovered and published by Trotsky historian Pierre Broue in 1980. Then in 1991 it was discussed again in an article in the Soviet journal ''V oprosy Istorii KPSS" ("Questions of History of the CPSU'') by American historian Arch Getty. It was publicized in Russia again in a work published in 1995 by Vadim Rogovin, who quoted it. Kirilina's book was published in 2001. She either did, or should have, known about the bloc and informed her readers.
As a final example of Kirilina's dishonesty consider the following:
In the Japanese magazine "Kiitso" of April 1939 Llushkov published materials in which he categorically rejects any involvement by Jagoda in the conspiracy against Kirov. Llushkov was at 4 Llteinyi pereulok Oane), in the NKVD, near Agranov, when Stalin phoned the latter and ordered him to send Borisov to the Smolny for questioning. Agranov immediately gave the appropriate instructions. It was only 30 minutes from the moment of
Stalin's call to the moment of the auto accident with Borisov, as Liushkov pointed out. And we can agree with Liushkov's opinion that this amount of time was simply insufficient to organize the murder of Borisov.(353)This can only be a deliberately deceptive statement.
* In both pretrial interrogations and at trial Jagoda repeatedly in-sisted that he had had othing to do with Borisov's death while at the same time also insisting that he was, indeed, involved in the conspiracy to murder Kirov. Kirilina cites Iagoda's lack of partici-pation in the first as evidence against Iagoda's confession to the second.
* Kirilina has clearly never read Liushkov's article in the journal Kaizo ("Reconstruction") of April 1939. If she had she would have seen that Llushkov insisted that Jagoda was indeed involved in a conspiracy - to force Zinoviev and Kamenev to falsely confess to Kirov's murder at their August 1936 trial a Liushkov also claimed that Shatskii was Nikolaev's sole co-conspirator in the assassination of Kirov. Kirilina would certainly nothave omitted these important details of Liushkov's article had she actually read it. Therefore, she gave her readers the false impression that she had read Llushkov's article but in reality she never did.
In his book Lenoe cites Llushkov's Kaiz o article at length, setting it for-ward as the strongest evidence now available that Nikolaev was a "lone gunman." In a later chapter of the present work we too examine the
Kaiz o article and demonstrate that Lenoe's interpretation of it is incorrect. Lenoe, however, has clearly read Llushkov's article. It is just as clear that Kirilina has never read it.
Materials In Kirilina's Book But Omitted By Lenoe
Kirilina and Lenoe share the same goal: to present Nikolaev as a lone assassin. Perhaps the most powerful method of arguing a preconceived idea is to suppress evidence that fails to support it. In the case of the Ki-rov murder there is so much evidence of a conspiracy that, were it all to be simply suppressed, almost nothing would remain. Therefore, in addi-tion to the omission of evidence inconvenient to the preconceived con-clusion, other techniques of misdirection must be employed.
Lenoe has told us that he considers Kirilina to be the greatest expert on Kirov's murder. He cites Kirilina's book many times, and ought to have cited it in some places where he did not. But Lenoe has also omitted some evidence that Kirilina presents. Lenoe has tailored his argument in a somewhat different and, arguably, more careful manner. Usually there is a discernable method to his omission of Kirilina evidence.
Nikolaev's Finances
Kirilina frankly acknowledges the evidence that Nikolaev was not in fi-nancial difficulties in 1934. She quotes from December 11, 1934 interrogation of Nikolaev's mother, Maria Tikhonovna:
As far as its material situation the family of my son Leonid Nikolaevich did not experience any hardships ....
The children were also fully provided with all the necessities, including milk, butter, eggs, clothing and footwear. (238)Kirilina guotes this·, passage from the article by historian Lurii Zhukov, where it is somewhat fuller.
As far as its material situation the family of my son Leonid Nikolaevich did not experience any hardships. They occupied a separate three-room apartment in a cooperative house, which he received in return for payment of the cooperative unit. Thechildren were also fully provided with all the necessities, including milk, butter, eggs, clothing and footwear. During the last 3-4 months Leonid was unemployed, which somewhat worsened the provisioning of his family, but even then they did not experience any special hardship.9
9 JU. N. Zhukov. "Sledstvie I sudebnye protsessy po delu ob ubiystve Kirova." Vopro[J istorii 2, 2000, p. 40. (Zhukov 2000)
Lenoe does not even mention this interrogation and passage. Perhaps he has omitted it because he argues that deprivation was a primary factor motivating Nikolaev's supposedly "lone assassination." This passage would constitute strong evidence against Lenoe's theory.
Lenoe writes "Nikolaev was desperate for money in the fall of 1934" (299). Even if he was - and the testimony just cited casts serious doubt on that statement - desperation for money does not necessarily entail neediness. Lenoe also quotes the indictment against Nikolaev:
Through the confessions of a series of persons who were interrogated in the present case as witnesses, including Nikolaev's mother T. Nikolaeva and his wife, Milda Draule, the investigation has established that the accused Nikolaev did not suffer from material need during this period of time, and neither did his family. (Lenoe 350)
Anyone reading Lenoe's book alone would have no idea where this tes-timony came from, and might assume it was fabricated by the NKVD instead of his mother's testimony and in fact represents Kirilina's view-point as well.
Kirilina continues:
Unmistakeable signs of the family's good material circumstances are the fact that L.V. Nikolaev himself possessed a bicycle (that was a sign in those years of a certain level of income), and in 1933-1934 the Nikolaevs rented a private dacha in the prestigious area of Sestroretsk. (238)
Nikolaev was even fined 25 rubles and ordered to pay an additional 19 rubles by the Party for hitting a pedestrian with his bicycle. (Kirilina 242-3) Kirilina cites evidence that Nikolaev always had had good jobs, even easy work, and was never unemployed until his dismissal from a job at the Institute for Party History in April 1934. She speculates that Nikolaev must have had good connections to be recommended for such jobs.(Kirilina 244-5) Neither Kirilina nor Lenoe try to account for these "good connections" as any good investigator would be sure to do. Perhaps they do not wish to suggest that these good connections were, most likely, the Zinovievites who were later tried and convicted of Kirov's murder along with Nikolaev. Nikolaev's wife Mil'da Draule also had a relatively well-paying job. (Kirilina 246)
If Nikolaev did indeed feel he was in need of money this "lack" was only a subjective one. He and his family still rented a private country house during the summer he was unemployed. Had they suffered genuine want they could simply not have done so. No one facing eviction or hunger rents a summer cottage. Lenoe never informs his readers that Kirilina acknowledged that Nikolaev was not in any real financial need.
We also know that Nikolaev chose not to take another job while he pre-pared to assassinate Kirov, a fact stated in the Prosecutor's Indictment ("Obvinitel'noe zakliuchenie", p. 20) as follows:
In one of his confessions the accused Nikolaev directly states:
"I informed him (Kotolynov) that I had decided not to go back to work during the period when I was preparing the [terrorist] act in order to have enough free time to carry out the murder of Kirov. Kotolynov approved my decision.
(vol. 2, l.d. 85)
The wife of the accused L. Nikolaev - Milda Draule, confirms this. She states:
" ... From the end of March 1934 right up to his (i.e. L. Nikolaev's) arrest he did not work anywhere. The reason for this is not Nikolaev's inability to find work, but his stubborn refusal to accept any kind of work. Having devoted himself fully to the preparation of the terrorist act, I presume that he did not want to tie himself to work anywhere ... "
(vol. 3, l.d. 201).
Kirilina never mentions this fact. Lenoe quotes at length from the indictment but omits this part of it here - a point we will consider in an-other chapter of the present work.
Nikolaev's Interrogation of "After December 4"
In a passage we have already quoted above Kirilina says that Nikolaev made the following admission "after December 4":
... (H]e was a member of an underground counterrevolutionary organization", that its "participants adhered to the platform of the Trotskyist-Zinovievist bloc". "The former opposition had their own specific accounts to settle with Kirov in connection with the struggle which he had organized·against the Leningrad oppositionists. (281)
We do not know at what point "after December 4" Nikolaev made this statement. Without citing any evidence or reasoning Kirilina simply declares it "fabricated" - as indeed both she and Lenoe do with all the evidence that does not fit their predetermined schema:
That is why the investigation steadily fabricated the 'conspiracy' version (281)
But at least Kirilina does record this statement, thus allowing others to view it in a different light. Lenoe does not clarify or even cite this im-portant quotation. He does quote parts of a December 13 interrogation of Nikolaev in which some wording appears similar to some of what is in Kirilina's quote, but suppresses the passage in which Nikolaev cites the supposed motive of the Leningrad Trotskyite-Zinovievite group in killing Kirov - that "the former oppositionists had their own accounts to settle with Kirov in relation to the struggle that he had organized against the Leningrad oppositionists."
Nikolaev's Confession of circa December 8
Kirilina quotes the following important remarks from Nikolaev without a precise date but implying December 8 or shortly afterwards:
The Kotolynov group was preparing a terrorist act against Kirov, and its direct implementation was entrusted to me personally. I was aware from Shatskii that the same task had been given to his group too, and also that this work was being conducted by them independently of our own preparation for a terrorist act.
... I first met Shatskii in 1933. Our next meeting was during the summer of 1934 at 28 Krasnye Zaria Street [Kirov's home address - GFJ, where Shatskii was conducting surveillance on the apartment and ascertaining all of Kirov's movements. He did this in order to prepare a terrorist act."
"Kotolynov said that ... getting rid of Kirov would weaken the leadership of the Party [literally, the ACP(b), or "All-Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik)"] ... Kotolynov worked out directly with me the technical details of carrying out the act, approved them, specially determined how accurately I could shoot. He was my immediate leader in carrying out the act. Sokolov determined the suitability of this or another point in Kirov's normal route, thus facilitating my work ....
Iuskin was informed about the preparation for the attempt against Kirov and worked out with me the variant of an attack in the Smolny.
Zvezdov and Antonov knew about the preparations for the act ... They were directly tied to Kotolynov ...
(Kirilina 281-2)
Lenoe does not reproduce this text or refer to it. He does summarize an interrogation of December 6 that contradicts this text in some places:
Eventually Nikolaev "confessed" that he had recruited Shatsky to watch Kirov's apartment for him, and strongly implied that Kotolynov had masterminded a conspiracy to murder Kirov. Moreover, he said that Kotolynov was planning to go to Moscow to assassinate Stalin. (Lenoe 288)
Though he relies heavily on Kirilina's book Lenoe does not clarify the relationship between the direct quotes cited by Kirilina of circa December 8 or shortly thereafter, and his own summary of part of a long interrogation of December 6.
On top of that Lenoe indulges in a favorite practice of his: to put quotation marks around any words or phrases that do not fit his preconceived conclusions, as he does here around the word "confessed". Lenoe acts as though using these "scare quotes" constituted some kind of argument that the confession was not genuine! This is one manifestation of the fallacy of "assuming that which is to be proven," a common error which Lenoe frequently commits. We will consider Lenoe's practice of "begging the question" and of "argument by scare quotes" in a separate chapter.
Kirov's Learning
On pages 325-327 Kirilina discusses Kirov's broad reading, especially in philosophy, and his involvement in education. Indeed Kirilina seems to have some respect for Kirov! She was, after all, head of the Kirov Mu-seum for many years. Lenoe omits all this in his introductory chapters on Kirov's life.
In contrast to Kirilina, Lenoe strives to insult Kirov at every turn. He says that Kirov is "generally perceived as one of the despot's thuggish henchmen." (119). By whom? Lenoe never tells us. Evidently he has in-vented this "fact". However, Kirov is not so "perceived" by Kirilina, Lenoe's major source, so this "perception" is not "general." The best Lenoe can do is to quote the British consul in Leningrad, who said that Kirov was "brutal looking", whatever that means. British imperialists were "generally" regarded as "thuggish" by millions of people around the world. Perhaps Lenoe never mentions the evidence of Kirov's learning because it might contradict Lenoe's attempt to portray Kirov as "thug-gish" and "brutal."
An Earlier Attempt To Kill Kirov?
Kirilina writes:
In one of his interrogations L.V. Nikolaev confessed that he had first planned to kill S.M. Kirov on November 14, 1934. And with this goal in mind he met him at the Moscow Station in Leningrad. But he did not shoot since a large number of people met Sergei Mironovich there.
And so he mingled with the crowd of those people and went away. (341)This event is also recorded in his diary under the date of November 14, where Nikolaev also seems to say that he had only tried to meet with Ki-rov on October 15. Yet in a diary entry of a few days beforehand, November 9, Nikolaev had written:
If on 10/15 and 11/5 I was not able to do this ... however now I am ready - that I am going to my execution is nothing - only it is easy to say it. (259)
This diary selection is quoted by Lenoe on page 242, along with a further section that appears to make it clear that he had intended to kill Kirov on November 5 as well. Since November 5 is in the past, it sounds as though Nikolaev is ready for yet another attempt - perhaps that of No-vember 14, mentioned above.
It would have been useful to put this passage in Nikolaev's diary along-side the text from the undated interrogation quoted by .Kirilina. From what we can see, the interrogation appears to confirm the notes in the diary that Nikolaev had made not one, but several aborted attempts to kill Kirov earlier. Lenoe omits this.
In any case pages 18-19 of the indictment contain a quotation from Ni-kolaev's confessions in which he plainly states that his diary accounts were faked:
Here it should be noted that in order to conceal the traces of the crime and to hide my co-conspirators, and also to disguise the true motives for the murder of comrade Kirov, the accused L. Nikolaev prepared a number of documents (a diary, statements addressed to various institutions, etc.) in which he tried to portray his crime as an act of personal despair and frustration due to his supposedly serious material situation, and as a protest against the "unfair treatment of a living human being by some government officials."
(vol. 1, l.d. 6).
The accused L. Nikolaev himself admitted the falsity and fic-tional nature of this version, and explained that he had created this version by prior agreement with the members of the terrorist group, which had decided to portray the murder of comrade Ki-rov as a personal act and thus conceal the real motives of this crime.
In his confessions of December 13 of this year L. Nikolaev di-rectly stated:
" ... I was supposed to portray the murder of Kirov as the act of an individual, in order to hide the participation in it of the Zino-vievist group."
(vol. 1, l.d. 266).
Zinoviev's Oppositional Activity
Kirilina transcribes a short passage from one interrogation of Grigory
Evdokimov, a Zinovievite and former Leningrad official accused as a member of the Moscow Center of the bloc of Trotskyites, Zinovievites, and Rightists:
At interrogation on December 24 G.E. Evdokimov stated: "In November 1934 he [Zinoviev] criticized the work of forming a united front [in France] and blamed the French Communist Party and also the leadership of the Comintern for striving for a united front in France." (Kirilina 365)Another arrested Zinovievite, LS. Gorshenin, went even further:
LS. Gorshenin went even further in his criticism of the foreign policy of the USSR. At interrogation on December 25 he stated: "Com. Stalin is consciously not activating the Comintern and is transferring the center of all attention onto the official diplomacy of theKirilina explains these statements in the following manner:
Commissariat of Foreign Affairs and in essence sacrificing the interests of world revolution to the idea of building socialism in one country." (Kirilina 365)
I should note that it was towards the end of 1934. The Opposition, or rather its leaders, had voted for Stalin's political program - the building of socialism in one country - at the 17th Party Congress. However, they did not agree with it and continued the line of world proletarian revolution, carrying on a covert struggle against the Stalin leadership. (Kirilina 365)
Kirilina takes it for granted that the oppositionists were guilty of "double-dealing" (dvurushnichestvo - "two-facedness", deliberate deception) in that they had rejoined the Party dishonestly. By contrast Lenoe blames Stalin for suspecting "double-dealing", implying that Stalin had imagined this out of paranoia. We discuss this issue elsewhere in the present work.
Lenoe never mentions these statements. On the contrary, he chooses to reproduce large parts of an interrogation of Zinoviev from December 22, 1934 in which Zinoviev denies any oppositional activity, and denies even oppositional thoughts after 1932. (Lenoe 328-333) This facilitates Lenoe's portrayal of Zinoviev as the innocent victim of a frameup -something that would be harder if he had juxtaposed Evdokimov's and Gorshenin's statements against Zinoviev's professions. In short, Kirilina admits that a "covert struggle" by Zinovievites and others against the Party line did in fact continue, while Lenoe ignores it, in effect denying it.
In his confession of January 13, 1935, to which neither Kirilina nor Lenoe refers, Zinoviev went further and agreed that a Moscow centre of former Zinovievites, hostile to the Party line, still existed. We will discuss this document when we set to resolving the Kirov murder ourselves.
So Kirilina's work is disingenuous in the same general way that Lenoe's is. Both of them proceed from the idle ftxe, the preconceived conclusion that Nikolaev was a "lone gunman" and, therefore, everybody else must have been "framed." But despite his acknowledged indebtedness to Kirilina's work Lenoe ignores it when he finds it convenient for his argument to do so.
Lenoe's Introduction.
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