Yesterday, December 1, was 75 years since the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the first secretary of the Leningrad Party Organization, and Stalin ally. It was on the night of December 1, 1934 that a certain Leonid Nikolaev, a disgruntled party worker, shot Kirov in the secretary’s third floor office. Nikolaev was immediately caught and interrogated under Stalin’s personal supervision. He was executed shortly thereafter.
Rumors have been circling for years as to what Nikolaev’s motives were. Some have suggest that Kirov was having an affair with Nikolaev’s wife. Others have suggested that he had a personal or work beef with Kirov. These questions remain mostly unanswered. Partly it is because they are unanswerable. But also because the majority of historians believe that Nikolaev did not act alone. For them, Stalin was the main culprit and wanted to get rid of Kirov because of his popularity. Since Kirov has been held up as a “moderate” and even “opponent” to Stalin. Nikolaev, therefore, was merely a patsy in a more sinister plot on the part of the vozhd to justify the use of terror against his enemies, real or imagined.
The idea that Stalin had ordered Kirov’s murder was not solely concocted by historians. According to NKVD reports, it was also one of the most widespread rumors at the time. But it wasn’t the only one circulating around. As Matthew Lenoe noted in an article on the historiography of the murder in the Journal of Modern History, rumors ranged from Leningrad NKVD chief F. D. Medved or his number two Mikhail Chudov personally committing or ordering Kirov’s assassination, to German, Finnish, Polish, or Turkish secret agents carrying out the plot, to speculation that a worker angered by the recent cuts in bread rations did Kirov in. Others thought that the killing was part of a larger plot of murder Maxim Gorky, Lazar Kaganovich, and the German Communist leader Ernst Thaelmann. But the idea that Stalin was behind it all swirled and swirled from mouth to ear, into exiled socialist commentary, on to the pages of defectors’ and so-called confidants’ tell-all memoirs, until it reached scholarly dictum through its reproduction ad nauseum by historians.
A minority of historians, most interestingly Oleg Khlevniuk and Alla Kirilina, who are no Stalin apologists and based their research on new archival evidence, have argued that the Stalin as culprit is “almost entirely myth,” according to Lenoe. The debate continues to rage, however, and will probably go on forever. But as Lenoe notes, ” In the end it does not matter for our overall understanding of Soviet history whether [Stalin] plotted Kirov’s assassination or not. There are far more important questions that need answering in the field.”
Indeed. Whether Stalin actually ordered the hit on Kirov doesn’t erase the fact that regime’s response to the assassination was a blind fit of violence that led to the arrests and execution of hundreds, if not thousands, in the weeks following, culminating in the eventual arrest, trial, and execution of Grigorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, the so-called “Moscow Center.” The lives of hundreds of thousands of others followed. There is also no doubt that Stalin used the Kirov’s assassination to his political advantage to eliminate his political opponents. We don’t need to pin the Kirov murder on him to recognize that.
Perhaps, the biggest lesson of the Kirov murder was not its use by Stalin from 1936-38 to justify terror. The lesson is in the quick adoption of “On Amending the Present Union-Republic Codes of Criminal Procedure” or the so-called Kirov Law on December 1, 1934, that gave terror legal justification. The law was as follows:
To amend the present Union Republic codes of criminal procedure with regard to investigation and trial of cases of terrorist organizations and terrorist acts against the functionaries of Soviet power:
- Investigation in these cases shall be concluded in not more than ten days.
- The indictment shall be handed to the accused 24 hours before the trial.
- The cases shall be tried without the parties present.
- There shall be no cassational review of the judgments or acceptance of petitions for clemency.
- The sentence of the supreme punishment shall be executed immediately upon rendering judgment.
This law is ominous in its brevity. It is this law that was the first legal step to wage terror. What the law giveth, the law taketh away. So in the end it is not Kirov’s assassination that should be remembered but how such events can provide the justification for extraordinary measures to be legally enacted. It is a reminder that the “state of exception” is always enacted by the sovereign in an attempt to preserve the “public good.”
{ 15 comments }
Pretty interesting article, I enjoy history and have taught US, British and world history here in Moscow. I’ve only been interested in Russian history for the past 10 years. I enjoyed your article and hope to see some more.
JD
The Kirov law may have been the first legal step to the mass executions of 1937-1938, but mass state violence and terror was already well established years earlier. The mass uprooting of “kulaks” from 1930-1931 involved as many people as the 1937-1938 arrests and almost as many fatalities. Since you refer to terror rather than The Terror without capitals or dates (1937-1938)I assume you think the mass deportation of “kulaks” to special settlements was something other than state terror. But, since it was violence with the political purpose of striking fear into a civilian population, that is frightening the middle peasants into the kolkhozes, I can not think of what it could be other than terror.
Hi I’m a student of history in India&have the USSR as a subject. I found this bit about Kirov really interesting as we just touched upon this topic with regard to The Terror in class today.This blog has given useful information beyond text&class.In fact I’d like to use this blog as a supplement for my assignment for the term. Can anyone (the blogger,perhaps?)throw some more light on the topic of Foreign Policy?
Good article, but I would agree with the comment above that state terror in the USSR began already before the Kirov laws. It should be traced to the Civil War violence, from both Reds and Whites. This pattern continued, though certainly in a more legal and regulated form, during the NEP, as the victorious Bolsheviks repressed oppositional political figures.
People! I suggest you learn to read. Find me the place where Sean says that state terror began only after the Kirov law.
Between J. Otto Pohl and Gleb Tsipursky – would you actually consider reacting to something that isn’t merely in your own heads?
What is interesting in this article is the implication on the Patriot Act. Have you considered the comparison?
Annie Bananie, Sean says it was “the first legal step to wage terror.” That is an explicit claim that there were no legal steps to “wage terror” in the USSR prior to 1934. First means nothing before it. Note he does not say the “first legal step to wage the Great Terror of 1937-1938.” Terror is left in its general non-capitalized form with no dates. So yes Sean does explicitely claim there were no legal acts “to wage terror” in the USSR prior to 1934. Since there are a huge number of legal acts to enact the mass deportation of some 2 million peasants accused of being “kulaks” in 1930 and 1931 and some 600,000 died as a direct result of these acts I think Sean is wrong. I think he is wrong because I think this mass uprooting of humanity does meet the definition of terror. Sean is obviously aware of the deportation of the “kulaks” and their fate so I am curious as to why he does not think it constitutes terror? If he merely wanted to state that the Kirov law was the first step to the 1937-38 arrests and executions he would have presumably used the term standard in the literature, “The Great Terror.” Instead he claims that there are no “legal steps to wage terror” in the USSR prior to 1934.
Dear J. Otto Pohl,
You are an idiot and your latest spiel only proves my point further.
There were two significant differences between
he 1936-7 Terror (notice, just to humor you I am using Capital letters) and the dekulakization campaign.
A. The dekulakization was a class based campaign while the other was not restricted to class.
B. and somewhat important to the topic – there were NO special legal measures. Lynne Viola has a nice article called “The Campaign to Eliminate the Kulak as a Class” – I suggest you take a look at that. The first paragraph says:
“The drive to collectivize Soviet agriculture in the winter of 1930 was “spontaneous”
(stikhiinyi) in the extreme. Spontaneous, in this context, is not a synonym for voluntary; instead, it denotes the process by which collectivization was implemented from January to March 1930. This process was characterized by a deficit in organization and order, a revolutionary impulsiveness tempered by
neither law nor legality…”
Now try and read Sean’s sentence again, please.
Since you have descended into name calling this will be my last response. But, point A is irrelevant and point B does not say what you think it means. Viola does not say there were no legal acts by the Soviet government to institute dekulakization. She says that such acts did not “temper” or restrain abuses during the deportations. You really need to read her more recent scholarship. She is very explicit as I quote below that the process of deporting kulaks was based upon decrees (i.e. legal acts) from the highest levels of the Soviet government.
Class based terror is still terror. Where in the definition of terror is the stipulation that it can not be based upon clas? But, the fact is that the largest operation during the 1937-1938 arrests and executions was operation 00447 “On repression of ex-kulaks, criminals, and other counterrevolutionary elements.” It accounted for 767,000 sentences of which 387,000 were executions. So there was a great deal of class based terror in 1937-1938. It was in fact intimately tied with the earlier dekulakization drive. See the summary below by Nicolas Werth.
http://www.massviolence.org/Mass-crimes-under-Stalin-1930-1953?artpage=3#outil_sommaire_5
There were lots of legal measures for dekulakization. I think you need to read some more of Viola’s more recent archival based articles or her most recent book. Viola in the quote above is referring not to the absence of any legal decrees authorizing dekulakization. Rather the fact that the implementation of dekulakization was not restrained or “tempered” by these legal acts. But, let us quote the woman herself, “On 30 January 1930 a special Politburo commission, chaired by V M. Molotov, submitted its decree, ‘On Measures for the Elimination of Kulak Farms in Districts [raiony]of Wholesale Collectivization,’ to the Politburo
for approval.’” (L. Viola, The Other Archipelago, Kulak Deportations to the North in 1930, Slavic Review, Winter 2001, p. 734.) In case you missed it a decree is a legal act. This was just one of many “special legal measures” involved in dekulakization. It is in fact the main legal act authorizing the dekulakization campaign.
But it was not the only one. Again we have another legal act referred to by Viola, “On 18 October 1930, a Russian
ouncil of People’s Commissars decree entrusted E. G. Shirvindt with
overall observation of special resettlement business, calling upon all Russian
republic-level agencies to keep him regularly informed.” (Viola, p. 738). Again another decree or legal act regarding the forced resettlement of “kulaks.” The number of legal acts governing the deportation of kulaks is quite large. The mass deportation of 2 million people did occur “spontaneously” it was in response to “special legal measures” enacted by the Soviet state. To say that there were no Soviet legal acts upon which they were based is silly.
My dear J. Otto Pohl,
I am sorry for offending you.
I had no idea who I was dealing with.
You must be one of those blood thirsty historians, obsessed with execution, deportation numbers and shedding crocodile tears over poor victims. Have you ever considered the fact that the kulaks deserved it?
Needless to say, you completely ignored my comment about the patriot act – because what would a historian of soviet atrocities have to do with nameless recent victims? You just about blamed Sean for not giving due respect to the poor kulaks, you picked on semantics instead of considering the point of his post and put your ego on the table for all to see. Hurrah I noticed and I am sure I am not the only one.
Let me guess – you are probably German or British – studying in one of those academically backward countries. Your people have either murdered millions of Jews or enslaved Indians and now you come and beat on the drums of morality and condemn anyone who does not capitalize the word Terror. Right?
My new post – Žižek’s Metapolitics.
In particular, I found his essay When the Party Commits Suicide to be profound and fascinating. What do you people make of it?
“Have you ever considered the fact that the kulaks deserved it?”
Is it actually a “fact” that the Kulaks deserved it?
why is it that the obnoxious, insulting, irrational arguments are always posted by people anonymously? annie benanie – is that the name you’ve published under? because i’ve read mr. pohl’s published works, under his name.
We don’t need to pin the Kirov murder on him to recognize that.
I think Sean got the balance right – what really matters is that Kirov’s murder radically changed the atmosphere within the victors – the new ruling class. No one was safe anymore, no matter how loyal or how much they’d done for the revolution.
Whether the Kirov law was the first step or second, is also of secondary importance, but it did help to speed up the great purges of 1936-38. Even though it seems to contradict the 1936 Constitution. I think Sean’s article is a timely reminder of an important event in Russian history. With terrorism high on today’s agenda, it shows how important it is to preserve legal safeguards against the abuse by the state. Two of Russia’s Constitutional Judges have resigned recently after having complained against exactly such erosion.
There is the widely cited number 681,692 of people executed in 1937-1938.
My question is if this is a number of the sentences to death or the actual people executed. If it was the number of sentences my second question is if there was a right of appeal.
Thanks
Jean,
According to Getty, Rittersporn, and Zemskov’s 1993 article in the American Historical Review, executions for 1937-38 are documented at 681,692. I don’t have my entire library with me, but according to what I have access to, Getty wrote in 2002 that during the mass operations of mid-1937 to the end of 1938, 386,789 people were given the death sentence by summary troikas. This doesn’t include other death sentences during that period since the mass operations only represented half of all executions in 1936-38.
The Kirov law suspended the right to cassational review and given that death sentences at least during the mass operations were handed out in abstentia and carried out very quickly, I seriously doubt appeal was ever in the mix even if the convicted had the legal right. I would be interested if anyone has any information about appeal.
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