On December 1, 1934, at 4:00 p.m., the elevator door on the third floor of the blue-and-white Smolny Palace opened, and out came its owner, Kirov, a member of the Political Bureau of the SOVIET Union and the first secretary of the Leningrad Oblast Committee.
The 48-year-old Kirov was rich and powerful, and no one expected that his life would come to an abrupt end on this day.
Kirov walked alone to the office, his level with 23 guards, but apparently not so many people in his office building, at this time only one guard Borisov followed 20 steps away - this is Kirov's own request, ordering the guards not to go near 20-25 steps.
As Kirov walked through a staircase and was about to enter the office of Chudov, the second secretary of the oblast, a dark shadow hidden here rushed behind him and, without hesitation, drew his gun and shot him in the head.
Hearing only two gunshots, the promising Kirov fell to the ground and did not move again.
Inside the office were more than two dozen city and state officials, waiting for Kirov to come to the meeting. Hearing the gunshots, the crowd rushed out the door and found Kirov, who had fallen to the ground, and the murderer who had fallen to the ground with a gun in his right hand.
The murderer was immediately brought into control, and Kirov was carried into the house, by which time he was dead, and the doctors who arrived immediately confirmed this.
Sergei Milonovich Kirov, born in 1886, was elected a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1923. He was an ardent supporter of Stalin, actively participated in Stalin's struggle against Trotsky and Bukharin, and was elected a member of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee in 1930, and was a heavyweight in Soviet politics.
Upon hearing the news of Kirov's assassination, Stalin was furious and rushed to Leningrad the next day with high-ranking officials such as Zhdanov, Molotov, and Froshilov, and personally led the examination and investigation of the Kirov case.
The murderer was Ledgnan Nikolaev, a former member of the CPSU who worked in the Ministry of internal affairs and the Institute of History, was later expelled from the party and unemployed in 1934. Nikolaev, who has been unemployed for more than 3 months, is not a difficult livelihood, his wife Milida is still in public office, and his family still has a villa outside the city, as nikolaiv's mother confirmed.
Under Stalin's thunderous anger, the case was quickly declared broken, according to the published bulletin, Nikolayev was a member of an underground terrorist organization called "Leningrad Headquarters", and on December 27, the court put the case on trial, announcing that Nikolayev had accepted the instructions of Kotorenov of the organization to kill Kirov, who had confessed to receiving 5,000 rubles from a foreign consul who was the contact between Trotsky and the conspirators.
On 29 December, all 14 defendants, including Nikolaev, were executed.
This, of course, is far from the entirety of the Kirov case, and it was followed by the great purge of the Soviet Union in the 30s.
Trotsky was defeated in his struggle against Stalin, by which time he had been expelled from the Soviet Union and had fled to Mexico, still clinging to his anti-Stalin cause.
Since the Kirov case is linked to Trotsky, it shows that although the old Trotsky is not in the country, the Trotskyites in the Soviet Union are still so strong that even Kirov can be assassinated, and who can guarantee that the next one will not be Stalin.
On January 17, 1935, Stalin himself drafted a letter entitled "Lessons from the Events Linked to the Murder of Kirov", proposing to "discuss and take a resolution on this case today". The letter concluded that the Leningrad headquarters belonged to the leadership of the Moscow headquarters, that they were all Zinovievites, and that this faction was "the most insidious and despicable hidden form of the white bandit organization, to be treated like the white bandits." ”
According to the meaning of this letter, The head of the NKVD of the USSR, the boss of the secret police, Yezhov, wrote a pamphlet in which he asserted that the Zinoviev and Trotskyites regularly informed each other of their activities... It has been shown that the Trotskyists have also embarked on the path of terrorist groups.
In other words, the Zinovievites are the Trotskyites, and the Trotskyites are the opposition, so the strike can be extended to all the opposition.
Trotsky was now in exile, and wherever he went, there was a possibility of assassination, and Stalin obviously regretted that he had only expelled him. It is true to say that Trotsky's hatred of Stalin was true, but he himself was always precarious, where he had the ability to support and finance the opposition in the country.
Yezhov and the Ministry of Internal Affairs ignored all this, and in any case did as Stalin intended.
From the beginning of 1935, the Ministry of Internal Affairs began to arrest people, starting in Leningrad, where the crime occurred, and in January and February arrested and exiled 843 people accused of being Zinoviev elements.
This was followed by more than 100 sentences for the kremlin organs and their families, including Senelopov, acting secretary of the Kremlin administration, and Cherniacsky, minister of intelligence.
In 1935, more than 100 people were arrested in Gorky, Kiev, Moscow, Minsk and other cities, accused of being Trotskyites.
In March 1936, Yagoda, head of the Soviet State Security Service, suggested to Stalin that the Trotskyists involved in terrorist activities be brought to court and all executed.
On 20 May, Stalin signed a resolution recommending that the military court of the Supreme Court of the USSR try all Trotskyites involved in terrorist activities and sentence them to capital punishment.
By the way, Yagoda himself, who began to make this proposal, was replaced by Yezhov on September 26, 1936, due to ineffective repression and failing to meet Stalin's demands, and executed on March 15, 1938, on the charges of participation in the Trotsky clique, murder of Kirov, etc., and his wife was also shot in June of the same year.
Witnessing what happened to Yagoda, Yezhov came to power and quickly stepped up his work, proposing that "it is necessary to suppress the villains of Trotsky-Zinoviev, not only those arrested, but also those who were exiled earlier".
This effectively includes all those who worked under Trotsky during the civil war, even those who had only joined Trotskyist organizations or had supported Trotskyist views.
The Trotskyites were soon implicated in the army, and Yezhov presented a copy of the "Grand Alliance of Russian Soldiers" obtained from Paris, saying that a group of senior Soviet commanders were preparing to launch a military coup, headed by Tukhachevsky, deputy people's commissar of defense of the USSR.
Tukhachevsky was one of the first Marshals of the Soviet Union, and Lenin gave him a golden sword, and he put forward the theory of deep combat, for which he also had a dispute with Stalin.
In May 1937, a new wave of arrests began. The first to be arrested were Kolk, the director of the Military Academy of Fulong and the commander of the Second Army Group, and Feldmann, deputy commander of the Moscow Military District; On May 11, Tukhachevsky was dismissed from his post and arrested on the 22nd; the rest were arrested by Yakil, commander of the Kiev Military District, Ubolevich, commander of the Belarusian Military District, and others.
On 11 June, after a secret trial, Tukhachevsky and others were accused of accepting instructions from the German General Staff and Trotsky to establish a Trotsky military organization, and all 8 defendants were sentenced to death and executed the next day.
Nine days after Tukhachevsky's trial, another 980 were arrested in the army, and in August another 142 officers were arrested, of whom 401 were executed.
In July 1937, according to Stalin's arrangement, Yezhov issued Order No. 00447, which called for the launching of a campaign to arrest former kulaks and anti-Soviet elements, and specified the number of arrests to be made in the regions, requiring it to be completed within 4 months.
The battle actually took more than a year. From August 1937 to November 1938, 787397 arrests were made, compared with 342,000, of whom 386798 (72,000) were shot and 380559 (270,000) were exiled to concentration camps.
The Eleventh Congress of the Communist Party of Russia in 1922 was Lenin's last congress, at which 27 members of the Central Committee were elected and 16 were later executed.
After the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923, seven members of the Politburo were elected, all but Lenin and Stalin, five others were put to death: Kamenev, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Lykov, and Tomsky.
The Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party of The United States (Brazzaville), held in January 1934, consisted of 1,966 delegates, known as the "Congress of the Victors," and 56 percent of these delegates were later arrested, numbering 1,108.
The army was not spared, and of the 5 marshals of the Soviet Union in the 30s, 3 were suppressed, and only Voroshilov and Budyonny were spared. A former commander-in-chief of the Far Eastern Republic and a five-time recipient of the Order of the Red Banner, Blücher served in China as chief military adviser to the revolutionary government in Guangzhou, the familiar General Gallen, who defeated the Japanese at Zhanggufeng in 1938. Blücher was secretly executed in November, and another field marshal, Yegrove, was killed in February 1939.
Marshals were like this, and the scale of suppression of other generals was even greater. Fifteen of the 16 army group commanders and deputy commanders, 60 of the 67 commanders, 136 of the 199 division commanders, and 35,000 of the 80,000 officers were sentenced or executed.
These were just some of them, as the wave of purges swept across all sectors of the Soviet Union and the elites were almost swept away.
So why stalin carried out the purge, this is not a whim, it appeared after a long period of brewing and development and multi-faceted preparations against the background of the intensification of internal contradictions in the Soviet Union at that time and the increasingly obvious crisis.
Stalin, after defeating his greatest rival, Trotsky, in 1927 and excluding Bukharin and others, was already in charge, and he wanted to make a contribution according to his own plan.
Stalin pursued the collectivization of agriculture and the movement of industrialization, which achieved considerable results, but in the process of implementation, the problems arose even greater. Ignoring the practical difficulties of the workers and peasants, Stalin imposed it by administrative means, artificially accelerating the development of heavy industry, and as a result, the living standards of the population declined and dissatisfaction arose. In response to discontent and continued planning, the scope of forced and semi-compulsory labor continued to expand, and society began to be turbulent.
The masses and officials at all levels began to question Stalin's policies, which were a precursor to the crisis.
Stalin was an iron-fisted man, and he could not compromise, which would be tantamount to admitting his mistakes, and his response was to strengthen the dictatorship, purge the opposition, and suppress the disobedient.
In the early 1930s, the crackdown on non-party figures began, but the purge within the party had not yet begun on a large scale, and the emergence of the Kirov case was a thunderclap that ignited the fuse that had been prepared for.
The truth of the Kirov case has not been clarified until now, and it may never be clear.
To sum up, the Kirov case still has the following doubts.
One is the murderer Nikolayev.
Prior to the assassination of Kirov, there had been two failed attempts to assassinate the leader, for which he was arrested, but he was quickly released, and the pistol, which was the same pistol that had been used to assassinate Kirov, was confiscated.
How Nikolayev got into the Smolny Palace, and how he lurked in the corridors, is not clear. And there should have been guards on duty on every floor of the building, but they were not there at that time.
The second was another direct party, Kirov's bodyguard, Borisov.
Stalin personally interrogated Nikolayev and was about to interrogate Borisov. Who knew that the vehicle escorting Borisov was in a car accident in the middle of the road, Borisov died on the spot, and the others in the car were unharmed. According to the medical identification afterwards, Borisov died in a car accident, but by 1959, the surviving doctors proved that Borisov had been hit on the head and died. Even more bizarrely, Borisov's wife later died inexplicably, and the driver of the car was imprisoned in a concentration camp.
The third is Kirov himself.
Kirov was always a staunch supporter of Stalin, but he was never in Stalin's closest circle.
During the Seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Communist Party of Bulgaria, there was a secret assembly initiated by Bordaev, the First Secretary of the North Caucasus Territory, and one of the contents of the meeting was to replace Stalin with Kirov, in which Kirov himself participated, a proposal which he rejected on the spot. The rally was soon learned by Stalin, and many believed that Kirov had told him on his own initiative.
At the subsequent meeting, Stalin should have been unanimously elected, but the final vote was lost by almost 300 votes. The results of the election were so dismal that 292 votes were burned, all 63 members of the Electoral Commission were persecuted in the Great Purge, 40 people were killed, and only 3 survived until the mid-1950s. Later Soviet researchers believed that this election had a great influence on Stalin and had a lot to do with Kirov's death.
By the time of Khrushchev, it had been determined that Nikolayev was not a White Guard or Zinoviev, but since there was no reliable information, the people concerned were dead, and it was impossible to find out the truth.
In any case, one result is certain: the Kirov case became the source of Stalin's great purge, kicking off the Great Purge of the Soviet Union in the 1930s.