INTRODUCTION

Leningrad, December 1st, 1934, 4:30PM.

First secretary of the Leningrad Communist Party Sergei Kirov entered the Smolny Institute building, greeted by his longtime bodyguard Mikhail Borisov.^[1] Together, they headed up the stairs to the third floor where top local party officials, including Kirov, had their offices.^[2] Waiting at the top were a couple of guards from the NKVD—the Soviet Union’s secret police. Entry to this area required a party membership card, but they immediately recognized Kirov and let him through. His bodyguard Borisov had disappeared.^[3]

As Kirov walked alone down the dimly lit hallway toward his office, one Leonid Nikolaev exited a bathroom just ahead. Upon spying the first secretary, Nikolaev turned his back, pretending to fuss with something, until Kirov passed behind him. Then, Nikolaev turned and followed Kirov, quickening his pace. They turned the corner.

Nikolaev took four quick strides, drew his revolver, raised it behind Kirov’s head, and^[4]-

gunshot, thud, gunshot, thud

Sergei Kirov was dead. His killer lay on the floor next to him. He may have attempted to shoot himself or simply fired once more into the air, waving his gun, but either way he soon fell to the ground, unconscious.^[5]

That such a high-ranking figure could be murdered in plain sight was itself significant. What made it earth-shattering was that Sergei Kirov was a close—perhaps the single closest—friend of Joseph Stalin, the iron-handed ruler of the Soviet Union. Immediately, the dictator boarded a train for Leningrad from Moscow with one question on his mind, “Who was really behind this?”

Before long, a series of mysterious events and revelations were uncovered: the bizarre death-in-transit of the bodyguard Borisov, the inexplicable arrest-and-release of the assassin Nikolaev months earlier, the shocking confessions of a vast conspiracy network arrayed against Stalin, and more. Together they combined to transform the strange murder of an unusually-important bureaucrat into a half-decade Soviet government campaign against internal enemies and saboteurs, leading to the execution of nearly a million Soviet subjects.

But who really killed Sergei Kirov remains a mystery.

KIROV

To understand the theories surrounding Sergei Kirov’s death, we must first understand his life. In essence, Kirov was an important man: above all, because he was important to Stalin. Born in 1886, Kirov was a striver who rose above his humble orphan origins to a regional university where he became enchanted with the local chapter of Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks.^[6] When, in the course of Russia’s revolution, civil war broke out between the Bolshevik “Reds” and enemy “Whites,” Kirov brutally suppressed anti-Bolshevik independence movements in the Caucuses, near modern-day Georgia, where Stalin was born. Then the Nationalities Commissar, Stalin was laser-focused on quashing exactly that kind of regional separatism.^[7] He approved of Kirov’s…efficiency.

By 1923, the Reds had won the civil war. Lenin’s revolution had succeeded. The next year, he gave up the ghost, leaving Stalin at the de-facto highest post in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. However, Lenin’s will was garbled and disputed. So, against Lenin’s other clearest successor—Trotsky—Stalin formed an alliance with two leading Bolsheviks, Zinoviev and Kamenev. But just as the triumvirate forced Trotsky out, Stalin turned on Zinoviev and his junior comrade Kamenev. They put up a fight, but they were no match.^[8] Kirov would soon prove indispensable to Stalin, as he was dispatched to Leningrad—home to Zinoviev’s political machine—to clean house. After all, who better than the man who tamed the wild Caucuses? So Kirov set to work, exiling trainloads of so-called “Zinovievites” to Russia’s bleak periphery.^[9]

His loyalty and success netted him a further promotion: membership in the Union’s highest political organ, the Politburo. Yet no sooner had Kirov dealt with the Zinovievites than Stalin had new enemies in Leningrad: this time, those opposed to agricultural collectivization, a policy which was causing famines and killing literally millions.^[10] Perhaps Kirov flinched. Amidst the showdown with these critics—many of whom, his own former comrades—he remarked in a letter to his wife, “Things are not working out very well.”^[11] Whatever his personal feelings, Kirov stuck by Stalin—not just as the dictator’s loyal servant but as his friend. In Moscow or Leningrad, they stayed at each other’s apartments; in letters, Kirov addressed Stalin as, “Soso,” an affectionate nickname used by few others; on vacation in Sochi, Soso relished Kirov’s company.^[12]

But in 1934, Kirov’s loyalty would be tested. Over the last four years, Stalin’s collectivization had starved nearly 10 million Soviet subjects to death. Yet if you attended that year’s 17th Party Congress in Moscow, you wouldn’t have guessed. Party officials—even disgraced and powerless Zinoviev—lavished Stalin with praise. Kirov glorified him, “the best helmsman of our great socialist structure.”^[13]

Behind closed doors, however, party elites had other things to say. Collectivization was a world-historical disaster. A dangerous cult of personality was forming around Stalin. Perhaps it was time for a new leader. One name allegedly floated? Sergei Kirov.^[14] He wasn’t the most senior Communist official, but he was almost universally seen as agreeable and competent. Yet when Kirov got wind of these whisperings, he rushed to report the matter to Stalin, ever the loyal friend and subordinate.^[15] Did this solidify Stalin’s trust in Kirov, or earn his suspicion? If his name appeared in such discussions, perhaps he was a threat. Whatever Stalin thought, perhaps Kirov had now made some enemies who rather preferred such discussions remain far from Stalin’s ears.

Just where Kirov stood is hard to tell, but by August of 1934 the two were once again vacationing together as usual.^[16] And in November, Kirov visited Stalin in Moscow. They had no idea this would be their last meeting. In the evening, they retreated to Stalin’s dacha outside the city, where they enjoyed a puppet show performed by Stalin’s daughter, watched a movie, and played billiards. Afterwards, they dined on fish Kirov had brought from Leningrad.^[17] Just two weeks later on December 1st at 4:00pm Kirov, back in Leningrad, decided to stop by his office to review some files before a speech that evening.

If only Kirov had somehow been able to access those files without leaving his apartment. If only he had AnyDesk, the amazing program that lets you access any of your devices from anywhere in the world at any time, as if they were right there in the room with you.

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THEORY I

THE INVESTIGATION

Within thirty minutes of the shooting, high-ranking Leningrad NKVD officers arrived at Smolny and began collecting witness statements. While some differed on details—“In what manner did Nikolaev fall to the ground?” “Was he still holding the gun when he was found lying next to Kirov or had he dropped it?” “Did anyone strike Nikolaev in response to the murder?”—nearly all of them agreed on the essential facts of the case: the number and timing of the shots, the orientation of the men lying in the hallway, and Nikolaev as the lone gunman.^[18]

The “Who?” was obvious: Nikolaev shot Kirov. The “How?” was also quickly answered when a search revealed he carried a party membership card – the only credential necessary to reach the third floor. All that remained was, “Why?”

In Moscow, Stalin had an idea. He slammed the phone down, shouting, “idioty!”, and summoned Genrikh Yagoda.^[19] Twenty minutes later, the NKVD central chief—the national head of secret police—appeared at Stalin’s office.

Back in Leningrad, Deputy Chief of the local NKVD Fyodor Fomin had made no headway interrogating the incoherent or otherwise catatonic Nikolaev when the phone rang. It was Stalin’s line, but Fomin recognized his boss’s voice. Yagoda asked if Nikolaev was wearing foreign clothes. He was not. Yagoda hung up. Minutes later, Fomin’s phone rang again. Yagoda. Same question. Still negative. But Fomin got the message. Stalin was headed to Leningrad, and he wanted to know who was really behind this.^[20]

As soon as Nikolaev regained his senses, Fomin launched into his first recorded interrogation with a simple demand, “Tell us who else participated in the organization of this attack with you.” Nikolaev insisted, “I prepared the whole thing by myself, and I told no one of my plans.” His stated motive was distinctly personal: he’d been mistreated at his previous job, dismissed from the party, and, despite multiple pleading letters, received no relief from Kirov, Stalin, or anyone else. Disinterested in his story, Fomin pressed Nikolaev repeatedly to admit his accomplices, but to no avail.

The next day, Stalin descended on Leningrad, and that wasn’t what he wanted to hear. Seeking answers, he summoned Kirov’s bodyguard, Borisov, to Smolny. But on the way from the NKVD offices where he was being held, Borisov’s transport truck crashed, killing him. The guards accompanying him were unscathed. Moreover, Stalin learned that the NKVD had apprehended Nikolaev once before in October lurking outside Kirov’s apartment but released him. Stalin smelled a rat.^[21]

The next day, NKVD central chief Yagoda indicted his Leningrad subordinates for negligence, including the Leningrad NKVD chief and his deputy Fomin. Admonishing the two, Stalin warned, “The murder of Kirov is the hand of an organization, but which organization is difficult to say right now.”^[22]

The following morning, the new lead investigator—supervised by Stalin-appointee Nikolai Yezhov—opened with as telling a question as his predecessor: “What influence did your connections to former oppositionist-Trotskyites have on your decision to kill Comrade Kirov?”^[23]

Suddenly, Stalin’s man was hunting for connections to the dictator’s 1920s opponents—Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev—enemies whose power lay in Leningrad and whose supporters Kirov had dutifully purged.

In fact, entries in Nikolaev’s diary uncovered days earlier mentioned the names of two known Leningrad oppositionists. To this opening question, Nikolaev averred that he knew these men as individuals but not as a group, and he maintained that he’d acted entirely on his own.

The next day, December 5th, Nikolaev was interrogated five times. The day after that, seven. Finally, he broke, confessing to conspiracy with several others in the plot against Kirov.^[24]

On December 9, Nikolaev’s old roommate was brought in for questioning, whereupon he confessed to participating in an oppositionist conspiracy headed by Stalin’s old enemies Zinoviev and Kamenev.^[25] A breakthrough. Three days later he coughed up full member rolls of all five cells of the movement.^[26] So the arrests began.

THE PURGE

On the 28th, 14 individuals including Nikolaev stood trial for conspiring to kill Sergei Kirov. Within 24 hours all accused were convicted and shot.^[27] Zinoviev and Kamenev stood trial in mid-January and were convicted of fostering a “moral atmosphere” critical of Stalin and Kirov and conducive to terrorism. Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years, Kamenev to five.^[28]

Kirov’s killers were dead, their role models confined to prison cells. Yet the investigation and continuing reports from secret police flooding Stalin’s desk painted a frightening image. All these criminals were just the tip of the iceberg. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky — they all had countless supporters, countless knives in the dark searching for Stalin’s back. Within two months, nearly 12,000 Leningraders were arrested on charges of terrorism, espionage, and more.^[29] Over the next two years, the NKVD arrested over half a million people across the USSR, executing more than 4,000.^[30]

Except…with each arrest, each execution, the worrying reports just increased. The Kirov case, closed by the sentencing of Zinoviev and Kamenev, was suddenly reopened in 1936. Overseeing it would be the man Stalin had trusted to take over the Leningrad investigation in December 1934, who uncovered the Zinovievite conspiracy where others had failed: Nikolai Yezhov.

Within a month, Zinoviev and Kamenev confessed not just to creating a terrorist “moral atmosphere” but to direct participation in the conspiracy against Kirov. In August they were tried, convicted, and shot. In the process, Yezhov uncovered more enemies.^[31]

And so the campaign continued, turning deeper inwards, to the NKVD itself. Yezhov discovered it had been _Yagoda _who’d given orders to release Nikolaev after his first arrest in 1934, and who ordered Borisov hold back from Kirov.^[32] Moreover, under interrogation, the driver of the truck which had crashed and killed Borisov made a shocking admission: a Leningrad NKVD operative had deliberately crashed the vehicle, presumably to kill Borisov and cover the NKVD boss’s tracks.^[33]

By the time Yagoda faced trial in 1937, he was joined by myriad others all of whom confessed to forming a broad conspiracy network which since 1932 had plotted to kill Union leadership, succeeding against their first target, Kirov. All pleaded guilty, were convicted, and shot.^[34]

But to ensure this network of conspirators was truly excised, Stalin couldn’t stop there. He directed Yezhov to institute mandatory arrest and execution quotas. By May of 1937, party members with no record of opposition were being rounded up by Yezhov’s NKVD. By July, almost every provincial party secretary was in prison, if not already tried, convicted and shot.

Over the next year and a half, official NKVD records count 1.5 million arrests and precisely 681,692 executions. Hundreds of thousands more surely perished from abuse in the far-east’s concentration camps. Further still, literally tens of thousands of deaths may simply have been forgotten in a rounding error.^[35] Of the Union’s 100 million working-age subjects, nearly 1% were murdered by the state in this campaign, motivated ultimately by the death of one man: Sergei Kirov.^[36]

IS IT TRUE?

But could this be true? Could it really be the case that millions of potential terrorists were spread across the union, infiltrating every level of government, plotting to kill Stalin? Could Nikolaev have been merely one member of an anti-Kirov, Zinovievite conspiracy in Leningrad? Well, let’s take a look.

According to Stalin’s official conspiracy theory, Nikolaev’s means are not very important or controversial. He was a veteran of the civil war, and many such men retained their service pistols. Though it expired in 1931, he did carry a license for the weapon.^[37] Nothing altogether unusual.

That he had the opportunity to make his attack on Kirov, however, was of significance. According to Stalin, the NKVD was party to the plot against Kirov, responsible for Nikolaev’s release in October, and for Kirov’s bodyguard Borisov’s absence at the moment of assassination and subsequent death in transport.

Yet the evidence on all three fronts is dubious at best. As for Nikolaev’s October arrest-and-release, he appears to have posed no threat to Kirov at the time. In fact, he wrote a letter to Kirov two weeks later begging for help and swearing himself a loyal “warrior” for the party line.^[38]

As such, there seems nothing amiss about the responsible officer’s behavior, because, in his own words, “(1) Nikolaev’s identity was fully established. (2) Nikolaev was a party member. (3) Nikolaev, who worked in Smolny, knew S. M. Kirov. [And] (4) …Nikolaev’s attempt to approach Comrade Kirov with a request for a job assignment [was] natural and not suspicious, as there had been such cases before and afterwards.”^[39] Indeed, according to NKVD daily logs, every single person taken into custody like this between October and November was similarly released without issue.^[40]

As for the mysterious absence of Borisov on the scene and his suspicious death, that’s a bit more complicated, and it’s central to the second theory of who really killed Kirov. So, we’ll deal with it in a minute. For now, let’s take it for granted that Borisov and the NKVD collaborated in Kirov’s death and that the NKVD killed him to cover their tracks. Where does that leave us?

Well, Nikolaev’s means are essentially uncontested, while his opportunity was provided by the collusion of secret police and Kirov’s bodyguard. Yet even if the NKVD had a hand in Kirov’s death, what evidence is there that a vast anti-Stalin conspiracy really motivated them and Nikolaev?

For one thing, Nikolaev’s confession of conspiracy came only after nearly a week of intensifying interrogation. While there’s no evidence to suggest he was tortured, there’s plenty that he was manipulated with false assurances of his own and his family’s safety: a conceivably effective tactic with such a mentally vulnerable prisoner.^[41] Moreover, the supposedly traitorous context in which Nikolaev wrote of his “Zinovievite” associates in his diary was in fact the opposite. Nikolaev describes them critically, accusing them of “traitorous” behavior against Stalin.^[42]

Further, Zinoviev and Kamenev aren’t mentioned in any interrogation protocols prior to December 4, more than 48 hours into the investigation and after Stalin’s appointees took over, at which point, suddenly, “oppositionists-Trotskyites” are the subject of the first question put to Nikolaev that day. In fact, Yezhov testified to the Central Committee in 1937, saying, “Comrade Stalin, as I remember it, called [me] in…and said, ‘Look for the killer among the Zinovievites.’ I should note that [Yagoda] did not believe in that…Comrade Stalin had to intervene. Comrade Stalin called Yagoda and said, ‘Look, we’re going to smash their faces.’”^[43] Yezhov is not a perfectly reliable source, but these comments, combined with the abruptness of the investigation’s turn and the discrepancies between Nikolaev’s diary and his confessions are altogether plenty enough to cast doubt on Stalin’s official story of a Zinovievite conspiracy.

Yet it remains possible. And if you’d like to dive deeper into it or any of the other theories we discuss, we release a bonus podcast doing just that for every video over on our Patreon. Go check it out. But, while we can’t say for sure that Zinoviev and Kamenev didn’t master-mind Kirov’s murder, by looking at a couple more theories, we may gain a clearer picture of relative degrees of plausibility. We may also in turn gain a better understanding of how exactly this one death ballooned to nearly a million executions in just a few years. To that end, if Stalin was cold and calculating enough to slander Zinovievites to death, sanctioning a cascade of carnage across his empire, could it be possible it was him who had Kirov killed in the first place, as a sort of casus belli for his reign of terror?

THEORY II

Since the end of the purges, many have leveled this precise accusation at Stalin, perhaps most significantly Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s eventual successor in the 1950s.

Significantly, Stalin and those who accuse him each regard the NKVD as complicit in Kirov’s death and central to their respective conspiracy theories. Kruschev himself asserted that “the killer of Kirov, Nikolaev, was assisted by someone from among the people whose duty it was protect [Kirov]” and that the death of Borisov in NKVD custody “in a car ‘accident’ in which no other occupants of the car were harmed” was highly suspicious.^[44]

But while Stalin believed—or cynically asserted—that the secret police was captured by oppositionists, those who blame him have a simpler answer. Stalin, after all, was the ultimate authority over the NKVD. In other words, he obviously had the means. In turn, four years after his succession to power, Khrushchev’s investigative commission concluded that Stalin had indeed been the man behind it all.^[45]

It seems a strange idea; Stalin and Kirov were close friends. So where’s the motive? One contemporary’s account, from an anonymous “Old Bolshevik” at the top of the party apparatus, recalls that Kirov opposed Stalin’s plan to execute a disgraced oppositionist in 1932, speaking “with particular force against recourse to the death penalty. Moreover, he succeeded in winning over the ‘Politburo’ to this view.”^[46] At the same time, Kirov seems to have ignored several telegrams from Stalin demanding Kirov expedite collectivization in Leningrad.^[47] It appears that—compared to his boss—Kirov may actually have been something of a moderate, which strained their relations.

Ergo, at the 1934 Party Congress, when a large contingent of regional party bosses began discussing possible replacements for the dictator, the authoritative and moderate Kirov’s name came up. Additionally, the Congress elected membership of the party’s Central Committee. Of the 1,059 votes counted Stalin received 1,056, while Kirov 1,055. Yet, as many as 289 ballots were uncounted: their results unknown to all but, likely, Stalin himself. Perhaps he saw that Kirov actually received more votes than him.^[48] Combined, these two events at the 1934 Party Congress could have rendered Kirov in Stalin’s eyes no longer a friend but an outright enemy.

So, with a clear motive and obvious means, on December 1, 1934, Stalin dealt with Kirov as he did all his enemies. But how exactly did Stalin get the opportunity?

Well, according to protocol, when Kirov was driven from his apartment to Smolny, his driver should have called ahead to notify building security…which was run by the NKVD. They would have been the only ones to know of Kirov’s impromptu visit, offering a simple explanation for the apparently incredible coincidence of Nikolaev’s chance encounter; the NKVD positioned him.^[49]

This doesn’t prove Stalin ordered it, but his behavior after Kirov’s death certainly elicits some suspicion. For starters, within hours of Kirov’s death, he revised Soviet judicial procedures with respect to terrorist crimes: limiting investigations to ten days, revoking right of appeal, and scheduling the sentence—almost always death—to be carried out immediately following the verdict.^[50] If Stalin did orchestrate the murder with a larger purge in mind, this would be the obvious next move, and it would explain how he had this legislation apparently ready and on hand right away.

Moreover, we can’t forget about poor old bodyguard Borisov: the man who just so happened to fail to protect Kirov and who suspiciously died the next day in NKVD transit to Stalin.

Why was Borisov so far behind Kirov? The obvious answer is that he was ordered to be by the NKVD, who wanted Kirov exposed. In fact, according to a 1933 Leningrad NKVD report to Stalin, the dictator had instructed the secret police to meddle with Kirov’s security by replacing his trusted guards, but Kirov rejected their efforts.^[51] Perhaps he saw the writing on the wall.

Then, after Kirov’s death, Borisov began to realize why he had been instructed to hold back from his charge, and when the NKVD received orders to “bring the bodyguard to Stalin,” they knew they had to tie up this loose end. He knew too much.

Means, motive, and opportunity: Joseph Stalin had all three. It was he who ordered the hit on Kirov.

But there are a few problems here.

Sure, Stalin attempted to adjust Kirov’s guard in 1933, but that was before the 17th Party Congress, when Stalin supposedly gained the motive to act against his friend. Moreover, Borisov had been Kirov’s bodyguard for over a decade but by 1934 was nearly 55 years old and had limited mobility.^[52] Therefore, it’s hardly surprising that he lagged behind after Kirov climbed three flights of stairs to the Smolny corridor where he was shot.^[53]

As for Borisov’s death, Stalin himself convened a commission of experts to evaluate his skull fractures, the street he was found on, vehicle condition, and any skid marks.^[54] Despite Stalin’s evident desire to pin Borisov’s demise on a Zinovievite conspiracy, the commission uncovered no evidence of foul play.^[55] Modern reviews of the original commission’s work have largely confirmed this, suggesting that tying Borisov’s death to NKVD conspiracy is likely misguided. Further still, the confession from Borisov’s driver that an NKVD officer deliberately crashed the truck was extracted with sleep deprivation and physical torture. In exchange for his “cooperation,” the driver lived to tell the tale, which he did in 1956.^[56]

There’s no question Stalin _could _have ordered a hit on Kirov, but why would he? Maybe Kirov flinched to fully enforce collectivization, but by 1934, he’d embraced Stalin’s demands.^[57] And that anonymous “Old Bolshevik” who recounted Kirov’s opposition to Stalin? It turns out he wasn’t a Bolshevik at all but a longtime exile from a different political faction.^[58] Additionally, it wasn’t all that uncommon for votes to be discarded at Party Congresses.^[59] And finally, Stalin’s suspicious judicial legislation is explained just as easily by his habitual paranoia, heightened following the murder of his close friend.

Altogether, this narrative of Stalin’s motive is backed up by a garbled, patchwork, and ultimately unreliable account of events which defies the otherwise accepted understanding of his relationship with Kirov. And that’s all without mentioning that a secretive hit job just wasn’t his style. Why hide it, when you could disgrace your enemy and valorize his destruction at your hands?^[60]

And as for Khrushchev’s commission and its guilty verdict against Stalin, that’s about as reliable as the torture-extracted confessions and show trials which formed the backbone of Stalin’s purges. Khrushchev was consolidating his own power, and maligning Stalin offered a solid pretext to replace his one-time supporters with new officials loyal to Khrushchev.

THEORY III

So, perhaps there was no conspiracy, no grand exposure of secret plots. Is it possible Nikolaev merely acted alone?

At first it seems hard to believe. Born in 1904, Nikolaev joined the revolution at thirteen, soon serving as a village soviet chairman. At 20, he was a member of the communist party, working in the Communist Youth League.^[61] He had a son, whom he named Karl Marx, and he raised money in his apartment building to erect a bust of the political economist.^[62] But by the time he was 30, Nikolaev was fired from his sixteenth job in the party apparatus. Life in the party was not easy on Nikolaev.^[63]

And when in March 1934, he refused mobilization—basically, to lecture railroad workers in Marxist theory and Stalinist propaganda—he faced a Leningrad party commission. Minutes record his behavior as “rude, extremely unrestrained, hysterical.” One member present asked, “Is Nikolaev’s psychological condition normal?” In turn, he was stripped of his party membership: the decision, unanimous.^[64]

Though he successfully campaigned for his reinstatement by May, he retained a censure on his record and proved unable to find work. His diary and other notes reflect a slow descent from frustration into panic and despair. In July, he wrote to Kirov. In August he complained to Stalin, “I have been sitting without work for five months. All of this has had a deep effect on me, that I am left completely helpless and sick…I have no life, no work, no path.”^[65]

In October, less than a week before his first arrest, he wrote to the Politburo, of which Kirov was a member, “I request that I be given in the first instance, in the shortest possible time, treatment at a sanatorium-resort, but if such a possibility does not exist, then I must give up belief and hope in a rescue.”

None of his letters ever met with a response.

By early November, Nikolaev began to write difficult to decipher “plan” notes in his diary, referencing Smolny and Kirov’s apartment and laying out sequences of actions to undertake in different scenarios, as well as sketches of Kirov’s daily routes.^[66]

In Nikolaev’s own words, his motive was simple. “The attempt on Kirov’s life had the main goal of making a political signal before the party that over the last eight to ten years of my life’s road and work there has accumulated a backlog of unfair attitudes…towards a living human being.”

This hardly proves Nikolaev wasn’t part of a broader conspiracy, but it does prove that he had a personal motive, that he didn’t need a broader conspiracy or political allegiance to Zinoviev or prodding from the NKVD to do what he did. Moreover, while there may be no direct proof against a plot, it’s hard to imagine this evidently unstable character as the chosen weapon of any conspiratorial mastermind.

As for opportunity, we’ve seen how allegations of NKVD collusion rest on shaky grounds at best, but one question remains: “How did he happen to be on the third floor of Smolny when Kirov arrived?”

According to an interrogation on December 3rd, Nikolaev was searching for tickets to a party meeting that evening, presumably to get close to Kirov, who was scheduled to speak. Smolny—one of several former work-places—was not his first stop, but he ended up there for over an hour. It wasn’t until he ventured up to the third floor—to which he would have had access, despite the censure on his card—where around 2:30 he encountered an acquaintance who offered him a ticket on the condition that Nikolaev return for it that evening. Satisfied, he went on a walk and returned to the institute around 4:30. At that point, in his words, “Going up to the third floor I went into the bathroom, relieved myself, and exiting the bathroom I turned left. After taking two or three steps I observed Sergei Mironovich Kirov approaching me along the right wall of the corridor, perhaps 15–20 steps away.”^[67] In essence, the answer is, “dumb luck.”

CONCLUSION

Maybe it’s a dissatisfying answer, but one look at the evidence, and it’s obviously in a different league of plausibility from the others. Yes, Zinoviev and Kamenev and Yagoda and Nikolaev and a million other people could have been in on it, plotting against Stalin and Kirov. Yes, Stalin was a monstrous dictator who very well could have killed his closest friend for political gain. But for one second, stack those accusations against the mountain of self-incrimination offered by Nikolaev—the diary, the letters, the obvious mental disturbances—and it instantly becomes apparent. Because for no other theory is there any such trove of evidence.

Maybe it seems just a little too lucky that he happened to be on the third floor of Smolny, but remember his October arrest. Even if assassination hadn’t occurred to him that day, he went on to study Kirov’s routines, watching him for weeks. Even if he hadn’t run into Kirov on the third floor, it’s just as likely he would have gotten a ticket to that evening’s meeting and taken his shot then, or on the Leningrad train station platform where he repeatedly waited for Kirov returning from Moscow, or some other day on his route home from Smolny. Nikolaev was determined. And even if he failed, maybe he wouldn’t have been the last to try.

Because it wasn’t just irrational suspicion on Stalin’s part; Leningrad was full of disaffected civil servants, bureaucrats, and functionaries. Moreover, the Union itself may have been full of disaffected subjects. As Nikolaev observed in his diary in late October, “A thousand generations will pass, but the idea of Communism will not be made flesh…For themselves, complete personal security, for us the most unbearable measure of punishment. For themselves, for their wives and children—garages with automobiles—for us stale bread and a cold room.”^[68] In truth, Nikolaev was right in his assessment. And though the party’s ever-active domestic propaganda machine blinded many to this fact, could he really have been the only one to recognize it?

To that very point, in this light it begins to become less and less confusing—how one murder devolved into the legalized execution of a million people. Because this was a sick system, led by a sick man, possessed by a sick ideology.

Think about it this way. In a democratic system, in theory, those in power have an incentive to deliver benefits to the public, relying as they do on the consent of the governed. This can create a symbiotic relationship whereby the public supports those in power on the basis of those in power supporting the public. Of course, this relationship depends on functioning competition which offers voters choices and invites participation, which may be more or less healthy from country to country

The Soviet regime, by contrast, did not develop such systems of public accountability. Instead, Lenin, Stalin, and their revolutionary comrades quickly rejected democracy, because their communist ideology demanded the centralization of just about everything in society—allocation of resources, prices for services, assignment of public jobs, even life and death. In turn, they created a massive, totalitarian state to see the revolution through, in essence, because the workers’ revolution was too important to be entrusted to, well, the workers.

This centralization and lack of accountability, however, did not create an efficient revolutionary machine. In the end, its results were simply disastrous. First, it eroded the incentives for competence in favor of loyalty. Government officials weren’t accountable to the public, but to superiors. Execution of demands and the meeting of centrally determined quotas trumped public welfare. Stalin’s collectivization, which Kirov dutifully carried out alongside thousands of others and which killed ten million innocents, is a prime example. Second, it incentivized secrecy, propagandization, and violent repression, since public knowledge of widespread incompetence and/or abuse might lead the public to resort to its only recourse against those in power: revolution. To that end, without elections, the regime’s only means of resolving political disputes was violence.

Now introduce to this unwieldy, violent, mess of a political order one Joseph Stalin. In the words of scholar Matthew Lenoe, whose research constitutes a backbone of this video, “[Stalin] was a vengeful and power-hungry man, and possibly a sadist in the clinical sense.” But he was also a true believer in the revolutionary ideology he espoused. His massive death tolls were not accidents but products of a complete disregard for human life in comparison to the imagined utopia to be achieved for the sake of the collective—not that such a thing is possible, anyway.

It was this set of conditions, of widespread poverty, of a security apparatus capable of repression but not of maintaining actual security, of a megalomaniacal ideologue and the dysfunctional political system he fathered, that made it possible for the xunstable and unhappy Nikolaev to walk into the Smolny Institute and kill Sergei Kirov, and then for Stalin to unleash a reign of terror. The reality of the crime may be less exciting than the lurid, vast, and shadowy conspiracy theories, but it is, in its own way, far more revealing than all of them.

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A = Amy Knight, Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin’s Greatest Mystery (Hill and Wang, New York: 1999).

B = Lenoe

C = Kotkin

D = Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich, Special Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 24-25 February 1956.

E = “Letter of an Old Bolshevik”

F = Matthew Lenoe, “Did Stalin Kill Kirov and Does It Matter?” in The Journal of Modern History 74 no. 2 (June 2002).

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1. A,189 ↩︎

2. A,189-190 ↩︎

3. B,152 ↩︎

4. B,157 ↩︎

5. B,157-158,167. The source and intent of the second shot is a matter of dispute. ↩︎

6. A,30-32 ↩︎

7. A,91 ↩︎

8. A,104 ↩︎

9. B,70-73 ↩︎

10. A,125-128 ↩︎

11. B,85 ↩︎

12. B,82/96;C,180 ↩︎

13. A,170-172 ↩︎

14. A,172 ↩︎

15. A,172 ↩︎

16. A,179-181 ↩︎

17. C,194 ↩︎

18. B,157 ↩︎

19. B,251 ↩︎

20. B,259 ↩︎

21. ??? ↩︎

22. C,208 ↩︎

23. B,281-284 ↩︎

24. B,288 ↩︎

25. B,309 ↩︎

26. B,310 ↩︎

27. C,213 ↩︎

28. C,219 ↩︎

29. B,456 ↩︎

30. C,305 ↩︎

31. B,463-465 ↩︎

32. B,471-478 ↩︎

33. B,477 ↩︎

34. B,478-480 ↩︎

35. B,468 ↩︎

36. C,305 ↩︎

37. B,647 ↩︎

38. B,229 ↩︎

39. B,398 ↩︎

40. B,397 ↩︎

41. B,288-289 ↩︎

42. B,283 ↩︎

43. B,281 ↩︎

44. D ↩︎

45. A,263-264 ↩︎

46. E,14 ↩︎

47. B,112-113 ↩︎

48. A,173 ↩︎

49. A,189 ↩︎

50. A,200 ↩︎

51. B,407 ↩︎

52. B,161 ↩︎

53. B,162 ↩︎

54. B,427 ↩︎

55. B,413-427. This section of Lenoe’s book is remarkably thorough, with input from several independent experts with excellent credentials. It is dense and impossible to reproduce worthily here. For more details, please read his work. ↩︎

56. B,477-478 ↩︎

57. B,113-114 ↩︎

58. B,533-534 ↩︎

59. F,374 ↩︎

60. F,378 ↩︎

61. C,198 ↩︎

62. B,210 ↩︎

63. C,198 ↩︎

64. B,201-205 ↩︎

65. B,216 ↩︎

66. B,239 ↩︎

67. B,249 ↩︎

68. B,226 ↩︎