Who Murdered Sergei Kirov? : 5 Decades Later, Death of Stalin Stalwart Figures in 3 Books--and in Kremlin Politics

Sergei Kirov never had the cabbage dumplings he asked his wife to make for dinner that December night.

Instead, the Communist Party chief of Leningrad was assassinated before he could go home to a late supper, thus becoming a historical conundrum that haunts today’s brave new world of glasnost and perestroika in the Soviet Union.

Now, almost 54 years after he was gunned down in suspicious circumstances at the city’s party headquarters, Kirov is a particularly compelling ghost. His murder is the subject or key element of three books due out over the next few months in this country.

The two novels and one historical account will be appearing here just as the question of who killed Kirov is being acrimoniously debated in the Soviet Union, where the past is once again up for an official rewrite.

All three books examine the bloody legacy of Kirov’s demise--the “Great Terror” launched by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in the 1930s to secure absolute power through a ruthless purge of potential rivals. Ultimately, the paranoia unleashed by Kirov’s death swept through all levels of Soviet society and may have claimed as many as 10 million victims.

Of the three books, the biggest splash is likely to be made by “Children of the Arbat,” a 685-page novel being released in translation here by Little, Brown next month. “Children,” serialized in the Soviet Union last year and now appearing there in book form, is the long-suppressed work of 77-year-old Anatoli Rybakov, who was imprisoned under Stalin and who insisted that the novel appear in the Soviet Union before being published abroad.

Years of Terror

The novel was a sensation in the Soviet Union because of its look into the years of terror--and Rybakov’s innovative portrayal of Stalin through the pock-marked dictator’s own eyes. In one internal monologue in “Children of the Arbat” Stalin muses, “It is not for Russia to reject the role of the individual in history. Russia is used to having a czar, a grand prince, an emperor or a supreme leader, whatever he is called.”

One of the Soviet Union’s most famous writers, poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, has hailed “Children of the Arbat” as “one of the most daring steps of glasnost “ and as a “geological cross section of terra incognita.” The book is also considered as perhaps the most important novel by a Soviet writer since “Doctor Zhivago” by Boris Pasternak.

“Reading ‘Children of the Arbat’ is like seeing inside the Forbidden City,” said Little, Brown publisher Roger Donald, “because, like Pasternak’s novel, it contains a Russian’s own view of life under Stalin.” Donald, who paid $100,000 for U.S. publication rights, added that his firm has ordered a relatively big first printing of 125,000 copies of the novel because of public interest here in the dramatic changes taking place in the Soviet Union.

At the time of his death, Kirov was a rising star in Soviet politics, viewed by some as the only man who could oust an increasingly unpopular Stalin. Kirov had opposed some early maneuvers by Stalin to eliminate political opponents. By at least one account, the last year of Kirov’s life was marked by increasing acrimony toward Kirov from a jealous and wary Stalin.

Although accounts of and suspicions about the assassination of Kirov vary, there is general agreement that Kirov died instantly from one gunshot wound to the back of the head. He was murdered in the late afternoon of Dec. 1, 1934 in the Smolny Institute, a normally heavily guarded former girls school converted to the headquarters of the Communist Party in Leningrad. The shot was fired by Leonid Nikolaev, an unsuccessful party member and job-seeker.

In the wake of the murder Stalin took a train to Leningrad and personally began an investigation in which, some contend, nearly all those with some knowledge about the killing were executed or sent to die in prison camps to cover up Stalin’s complicity. Within weeks of the murder Stalin had used Kirov’s death as a pretext for arresting other high party officials, who were made to confess to conspiracies later aired in carefully contrived show trials.

A ‘Crucial Issue’

Kirov’s slaying “remains one of the crucial issues in Soviet history and one which I think still can have tremendous political consequences, whatever the final interpretation is,” said Harvard University Russian history specialist Adam B. Ulam, whose novel “The Kirov Affair” will be published next month.

Historian Robert Conquest of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, whose factual examination of Kirov’s death--”Stalin and the Kirov Murder”--will be published this fall by Oxford University Press, sees the argument over the murder as a proxy debate over Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s more liberal social and economic policies.

“You can’t fight on perestroika (economic restructuring) but you can fight on Stalinism,” Conquest said. “History is now the key to the political struggle.”

British historian Paul Johnson, who has written about that era in his book “Modern Times” and who keeps an eye on developments in the Soviet Union, said the Kirov murder “was the great watershed at which the regime, which had always been violent, toppled over into mass murder.”

Many Western historians believe that Kirov died as the result of a plot masterminded by Stalin, who feared that Kirov’s popularity in and out of the party threatened him politically. During interrogation, the actual triggerman is said to have pointed to security men participating in the investigation of the murder as the ones who “made me do it.” Nikolaev reportedly was pistol-whipped unconscious for this statement--made in Stalin’s presence--by the very men he had accused. He was later executed after a secret trial.

However, in the Soviet Union official responsibility for the murder still lies with Nikolaev, who allegedly was part of a conspiracy to overthrow Stalin.

Under Gorbachev, Stalin’s reputation has undergone a steep devaluation. In a major speech last November, Gorbachev called for a major re-examination of Soviet history in the 1920s and 1930s.

“It is essential to assess the past with a sense of historical responsibility and on the basis of historical truth,” the Soviet leader said then. Gorbachev went on to denounce “real crimes stemming from an abuse of power” by Stalin. But he also credited Stalin with “incontestable contribution to the struggle for socialism” and stopped short of a blanket condemnation of the dictator, who died in 1953.

Stalin’s Crimes

Harvard’s Ulam, author of a widely respected biography of Stalin as well as the new novel, believes the current Soviet government is treading close to a political cliff on the issue of Stalin’s crimes.

“The point is that up to now in the critique of Stalin, the regime always has been talking out of both sides of its mouth,” Ulam has stated. “It’s very difficult for them to maintain this sort of dichotomy about Stalin with Gorbachev saying, ‘Well, he was a man who’s done all sorts of criminal things. At the same time he saved us during the war (World War II) and also Stalin was the prime agent of industrialization of the Soviet Union.’ ”

In fact, Ulam believes the current position on Stalin is untenable. “It’s like saying Hitler built the Autobahn and told people to become part of the cult of physical exercise and fitness,” he asserted. “The regime is really--I won’t say tottering on the brink of destruction--but tottering on the brink of self-repudiation about this whole business with Stalin.”

Ulam believes that Soviet “liberation from the horrors of the past cannot come until the regime is courageous enough to say not only criminal things happened (under Stalin) but also absolutely absurd things.”

But he acknowledged that there are risks in telling the truth. An honest history of the Stalin period “would certainly increase enormously the psychological danger of people--not ceasing to believe in communism because most people don’t care about that--but people seeing the regime as something preposterous and ridiculous and asking themselves, ‘Why should we have it in the first place?’ ”

Interestingly, Ulam is one Western historian who has not placed the blame for Kirov’s death on Stalin. In his 1973 biography of the dictator “I indicate that probably it was a case of assassination by Nikolaev and that we really don’t have enough evidence, except from rather biased sources, that it was done by Stalin,” he said.

Nonetheless, Ulam said that “the presumption has to remain that quite possibly Stalin licensed, in a very involved way, the killing of Kirov.” And, without giving away too much of the plot, in his novel Ulam places moral responsibility for the death on Stalin.

The Hoover Institution’s Conquest, author of a book about the Stalin purges called “The Great Terror” as well as his new book about the Kirov killing, noted that the Soviet Union has been trying to come to terms with its Stalin period since the 1950s.

“They’ve been 30 years trying to bite the bullet,” he said.

In his so-called “secret speech” of 1956, then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev strongly implied to other party members that the impetus for Kirov’s death came from high up, Conquest pointed out.

In that speech Khrushchev said, “After the murder of Kirov, top functionaries of the Leningrad NKVD (the Soviet secret police) were given very light sentences (for failure to prevent Kirov’s assassination), but in 1937 they were shot. We can assume that they were shot in order to cover the traces of the organizers of Kirov’s killing.”

Khrushchev Suspicious

Khrushchev, who was deposed in 1964, also said it was suspicious that Kirov’s bodyguard was killed the day after the assassination “in a car accident in which no other occupants of the car were harmed.” Khrushchev’s attempts at “de-Stalinization” died after he was removed from power and his successors reinstated Stalin to most of his former glory.

Conquest noted that for the moment at least the argument about Kirov in the Soviet Union is being fought along unofficial lines, usually by writers and journalists.

For instance, in February the weekly newspaper Nedelya charged that Stalin’s secret police chief Genrik Yagoda “was one of the central figures in arranging the assassination of S. M. Kirov.”

This was reported to be the first public hint that a Stalin crony was involved in the slaying and was contained in an article about Nikolai Bukharin, executed by Stalin after a 1938 show trial. Bukharin, accused of involvement in Kirov’s murder, was one of 20 victims of that trial who were recently rehabilitated and declared innocent of all charges. The only defendant at the trial who has not been rehabilitated is Yagoda, who became a victim of the terror system he helped create.

Last December another journal, a weekly magazine called Ogonyok, published previously suppressed sections of the memoirs of Anastas I. Mikoyan, for decades a party and government official. Early in 1934 Stalin was so unpopular with party members that he was almost replaced as the party’s general secretary by Kirov, the memoirs reported. A few months later Kirov was killed.

Play Accuses Stalin

Last week a controversial new play, “Onward . . . Onward . . . Onward,” premiered in the remote city of Tomsk after being published in a Moscow literary monthly. By Mikhail F. Shatrov, a leading Soviet playwright, the work accused Stalin of plotting Kirov’s murder.

Conquest concluded, “There was no motive for anyone but Stalin to kill Kirov.”

Conservative historian Johnson said it will be fascinating to see how far the Soviet Union goes in telling itself the truth about its own past.

“The murder of Kirov is particularly important because of everything that followed from it,” he explained. “If you say that was Stalin’s act, then in logic you really have to rehabilitate absolutely everyone after ‘34, don’t you? . . . There is no logical point, once you start to unscramble the lies, at which you can stop telling the truth. You may invent an arbitrary point and enforce it, but it’s very difficult to do that.”