Sergei Kirov
Sergei Kirov | |||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Сергей Киров | |||||||||
17th Politburo | |||||||||
In office 13 July 1930 – 1 December 1934 | |||||||||
| |||||||||
Personal details | |||||||||
Born | Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov 27 March 1886 Russian SFSR, Soviet Union[1] | ||||||||
Manner of death | Assassination | ||||||||
Resting place | Kremlin Wall Necropolis, Moscow | ||||||||
Political party | RSDLP (Bolsheviks) (1904–1918) All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (1918–1934) | ||||||||
Signature | |||||||||
Sergei Mironovich Kirov[a] (born Kostrikov;[b] 27 March 1886 – 1 December 1934) was a Russian and Soviet politician and Bolshevik revolutionary.
Kirov was an early revolutionary in the
On 1 December 1934, Kirov was shot and killed by
Early life
Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov was born on 27 March [O.S. 15 March] 1886 in Urzhum in Vyatka Governorate, Russian Empire, as one of seven children born to Miron Ivanovich Kostrikov and Yekaterina Kuzminichna Kostrikova (née Kazantseva). Their first four children had died young, while Anna (born 1883), Sergei (1886), and Yelizaveta (1889) survived.[3]
Miron, an
In 1901, a group of wealthy benefactors provided a
Revolutionary
Kirov was a participant in the
By this time, Kirov had shortened his last name from Kostrikov to Kirov, a practice common among Russian revolutionaries of the time. Kirov began using the
Kirov became commander of the Bolshevik military administration in Astrakhan and fought for the Red Army in the Russian Civil War until 1920. Simon Sebag Montefiore writes: "During the Civil War, he was one of the swashbuckling commissars in the North Caucasus beside Ordzhonikidze and Mikoyan. In Astrakhan he enforced Bolshevik power in March 1919 with liberal bloodletting; more than 4,000 were killed. When a bourgeois was caught hiding his own furniture, Kirov ordered him shot."[7]
Career
In 1921, Kirov became First Secretary of the
In 1934, at the
Reputation
After Kirov's assassination, he acquired a reputation for having repeatedly stood up to Stalin in private and for becoming so popular that he was a threat to Stalin's supremacy. He did display some independence from Stalin.
In his hunger for popularity, Kirov opted for the simple style. He lived on Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt in a large house, inhabited by all sorts of people, he walked to work, wandered on his own around the streets of the city, took his children for rides in his car and played hide-and-seek with them in the yard ... as if to emphasize that Stalin lived in the Kremlin, with guards, didn't wander the streets or play hide-and-seek with his children, thus underlining the idea that Stalin was afraid of the people, whereas Kirov was not.[12]
At the end of the Communist Party's Seventeenth Congress, in February 1934, there is reputed to have been a scandal, when Kirov topped the poll in elections to the Central Committee, and Stalin's acolyte, Lazar Kaganovich ordered a number of ballots be destroyed so that Stalin and Kirov could share top billing.[13] Amy Knight, a historian of the Soviet Union, suggests that whereas Kirov "might have toed the line as others did, on the other hand he might have acted as a rallying point for those who wanted to oppose his [Stalin’s] dictatorship." Further, Knight suggests that Kirov would not have been a willing accomplice when the full force of Stalin's terror was unleashed in Leningrad.[14]
Knight's contention is supported by the fact that whereas most of the elite tried to anticipate what Stalin desired and to act accordingly, Kirov did not always do what Stalin wanted. In 1934, Stalin wanted Kirov to come to Moscow permanently. Whereas all the other members of the Politburo would have complied, Stalin accepted that, as Kirov had no desire to leave Leningrad, he would not come to Moscow until 1938. Again, when Stalin wanted Filipp Medved moved from the Leningrad NKVD to Minsk, Kirov refused to agree and, rarely for Stalin, he had to accept defeat.[9]
However, it would be wrong to claim Kirov had moral superiority over his colleagues. In modern St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), there is a museum to show all the gifts that Kirov accepted and used from inhabitants and businesses over which he ruled. The guides of the museum imply that these were
Kirov, by his manners and methods, reminded me of the cultured high officials of the Austrian administration.... In the office of Kirov, governor of Leningrad in 1929, one felt that the revolution had already been tamed and canalized.... Kirov was hated, with a hatred that was as fierce as it was impotent.[15]
Assassination
In the first days when Leningrad was orphaned, Stalin rushed there. He went to the place where the crime against our country was committed. The enemy did not fire at Kirov personally. No! He fired at the proletarian revolution.
On the afternoon of Saturday, 1 December 1934, Kirov's assassin,
Nikolayev was well known to the
However, Nikolayev's first attempt at killing Kirov failed. On 15 October 1934, Nikolayev packed his Nagant revolver in a briefcase and entered the Smolny Institute where Kirov now worked. Although Nikolayev was initially passed by the main security desk at Smolny, he was arrested after an alert guard asked to examine his briefcase, which was found to contain the revolver.
According to Barmine's account, with Stalin's approval, the NKVD had previously withdrawn all but four police bodyguards assigned to Kirov. These four guards accompanied Kirov each day to his offices at the Smolny Institute, and then left. On 1 December 1934, the usual guard post at the entrance to Kirov's offices was supposedly left unmanned, even though the building housed the chief offices of the Leningrad party apparatus and was the seat of the local government.[18][20] According to some reports, only a single friend, Commissar Borisov, an unarmed bodyguard of Kirov's, remained.[20][17] Given the circumstances of Kirov's death, Barmine stated that "the negligence of the NKVD in protecting such a high party official was without precedent in the Soviet Union."[19]
Kirov was cremated and his ashes interred in the
Aftermath
After Kirov's death, Stalin called for swift punishment of the traitors and those found negligent in Kirov's death. Nikolayev was tried alone and secretly by
Several NKVD officers from the Leningrad branch were convicted of negligence for not adequately protecting Kirov and sentenced to prison terms of up to ten years. According to Barmine, none of the NKVD officers were executed in the aftermath, and none actually served time in prison. Instead, they were transferred to executive posts in Stalin's
According to Soviet dissident
Comrade Stalin personally directed the investigation of Kirov's assassination. He questioned Nikolayev at length. The leaders of the Opposition placed the gun in Nikolayev's hand![24]
Other speakers duly rose to condemn the Opposition: "The Central Committee must be pitiless—the Party must be purged... the record of every member must be scrutinized...." No one at the meeting mentioned the initial theory that fascist agents had been responsible for the assassination.[24] Barmine asserts Stalin even used the Kirov assassination to eliminate the remainder of the Opposition leadership, accusing Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Abram Prigozhin, and others who had stood with Kirov in opposing Stalin (or who had simply failed to acquiesce to Stalin's views), of being "morally responsible" for Kirov's murder, and therefore guilty of complicity.[23] Barmine also claimed that Stalin arranged the murder with the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, who armed Nikolayev and sent him to assassinate Kirov.[25]
Kirov's assassination became a major event in the history of the Soviet Union because it was used by Stalin as an excuse to justify his reign of terror known as the
According to
Nikita Khrushchev, in his controversial
Historians Alla Kirilina and Oleg Khlevniuk, based on extensive research of the Soviet archives, assert that the conventional narratives of Stalin's complicity in Kirov's assassination is almost entirely a myth.[32] Historian Matt Lenoe finds their case convincing, arguing that ordering a hit on Kirov did not make political sense for Stalin, nor did it fit with the modus operandi of Soviet politics in the mid-1930s.[32]
Furthermore, according to Lenoe, "if we follow accepted rules of historical evidence–privileging, for example, archival documentation over third-hand transmitted by word of mouth– then almost all of the conventional narrative disappears". He notes that most of the evidence for Stalin's complicity derives from his own show trials, rumors reported by Soviet defectors and
Pospelov Commission investigation
In December 1955, after Khrushchev assumed control of the Party, the
It must be asserted that to this day the circumstances surrounding Kirov's murder hide many things which are inexplicable and mysterious and demand a most careful examination. There are reasons for the suspicion that the killer of Kirov, Nikolayev, was assisted by someone from among the people whose duty it was protect the person of Kirov. A month and a half before the killing, Nikolayev was arrested on the grounds of suspicious behavior, but he was released and not even searched. It is an unusually suspicious circumstance that when the Chekist [Borisov] assigned to protect Kirov was being brought for an interrogation, on 2 December 1934, he was killed in a car "accident" in which no other occupants of the car were harmed. After the murder of Kirov, top functionaries of the Leningrad NKVD were relieved of their duties and were given very light sentences, 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.[22]
Pospelov subsequently spoke to Dr. Kirchakov and former nurse Trunina, former members of the party, who had been mentioned in a letter by another member of the commission, Olga Shatunovskaya, as having knowledge of the Kirov murder. Kirchakov confirmed that he did talk to Shatunovskaya and Trunina about some of the unexplained aspects of the Kirov murder case and agreed to provide the commission with a written deposition. He stressed that his statement was based on the testimony of one Comrade Yan Olsky, a former NKVD officer who was demoted after Kirov's murder and transferred to the People's Supply System [citation needed].
In his deposition, Kirchakov wrote that he had discussed the Kirov's murder and the role of Fyodor Medved with Olsky. Olsky was of the firm opinion that Medved, Kirov's friend and NKVD security chief of the Leningrad branch, was innocent of the murder. Olsky also told Kirchakov that Medved had been barred from the NKVD Kirov assassination investigation. Instead, the investigation was carried out by a senior NKVD chief, Yakov Agranov, and later by another NKVD bureau officer whose name he did not remember.
The other NKVD official may have been
Khrushchev's report, On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, was later read at closed-door Party meetings. Afterwards, new material was received by the Pospelov Committee, including the assertion by Kirov's chauffeur, Kuzin, that Commissar Borisov, Kirov's friend and bodyguard, who was responsible for Kirov's round-the-clock security at the Smolny Institute, was intentionally killed, and that his death in a road accident was not an accident at all.[34]
Politburo Commission headed by A. Yakovlev
The last attempt in the Soviet Union to review the Kirov murder case was the Politburo Commission headed by
Legacy
Many cities, streets and factories were named or renamed after Kirov in Russia, including the cities of
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of the locations and buildings named after Kirov have been renamed, especially outside of
The S. M. Kirov Forestry Academy in Leningrad was named after him but renamed the Saint Petersburg State Forest Technical University.[39] For many years, a huge granite and bronze statue of Kirov dominated the city of Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, erected on a hill in 1939. The statue was dismantled in January 1992, shortly after Azerbaijan gained its independence.[40]
The Kirov Prize, a
The English communist poet John Cornford wrote an eponymous poem in his honour.[41]
The
The Khai-3 tailless airplane was also named after him.
Personal life
Kirov was married to Maria Lvovna Markus (1885–1945) from 1911, although they never formally registered their relations. Yevgenia Kostrikova (1921–1975), who claimed to be Kirov's daughter, was a famous tank company commander and World War II veteran.
Honours and awards
See also
- List of unsolved murders
- Red Terror
Notes
References
- ^ a b c d e Sergei Kirov. Encyclopaedia Britannica
- ^ a b Popson, Nancy. "Who Killed Kirov? The Crime of the Century". Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Retrieved 3 January 2022.
- ^ Lenoe, pp. 128–129
- ^ Lenoe, pp. 129–132
- ISBN 0-04-947021-3.
- ^ Lenoe, p. 186
- ISBN 1-4000-7678-1
- ^ Kirov, Sergey (1944). Selected articles and speeches 1918–1934 (Russian). Moscow Russia Valovay 28: OGIZ The State political literature publisher. pp. 106–117, 269–289.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location (link) - ^ ISBN 9780957296107.
- ^ Montefiore. The Court of the Red Tsar. p. 95.
- ^ Orlov, Alexander (1954). A Secret History of Stalin's Crimes. London: Jarrolds. pp. passim.
- ISBN 0-091737-42-7.
- ^ Medvedev, Roy (1976). Let History Judge, The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. Nottingham: Spokesman. p. 156.
- ISBN 978-0-8090-6404-5
- ISBN 0-906-13322-X.
- New York Times.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-8090-6404-5
- ^ a b c d e f Orlov, Alexander, The Secret History of Stalin's Crimes, New York: Random House (1953)
- ^ a b c Barmine, p. 252
- ^ a b Barmine, pp. 247–252
- ^ .
- ^ a b Khrushchev, N.S. (1989) On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, London, p. 21
- ^ a b c Barmine, p. 248
- ^ a b c Barmine, p. 249
- ^ Barmine, p. 55
- ISBN 9780957296107.
- ^ Conversation between John Holroyd-Doveton and Tanya, daughter of former Soviet Foreign Secretary Maxim Litvinov
- OCLC 41594812.
- ISBN 978-0-521-33570-6.
- ^ Nikolaevsky, Boris (23 August 1941) The Kirov Assassination: The New Leader
- ^ a b Khrushchev, Nikita. "Speech to 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U". Marxists.org. Retrieved 11 December 2015.
- ^ S2CID 142829949.
- ^ "Murder of Kirov". Seventeen Moments in Soviet History. 30 August 2015. Retrieved 30 October 2023.
- ^ Pospelov, P. N. (1955) Materials on the Question of the Murder of S. M. Kirov. Reprinted in Svobodnaia mysl 8 (1992). Translated from the Russian by Ranjana Saxena.
- ISBN 9780521446709
- ^ Ukrayinska Pravda(14 July 2016)
- ^ https://photo.unian.ua/photo/535979-dismantling-monument-to-sergei-kirov
- ^ "The Opinion of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine in the case of renaming the Kirovohrad oblast is given". Українське право - інформаційно-правовий портал. 5 February 2019.
- ^ "St. Petersburg State Forest Technical University". Archived from the original on 20 April 2013. Retrieved 19 April 2013.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - ^ "Best View of the Bay – What Happened to Kirov's Statue?". Azerbaijan International. Retrieved 19 January 2020.
- ^ "Sergei Mironovitch Kirov Poem by Rupert John Cornford". Poem Hunter. 10 May 2011.
- ISBN 978-1-84486-089-0.
Cited sources
- Barmine, Alexander (1945). One Who Survived. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
- Lenoe, Matthew E. (2010). The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (ePub ed.). Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-11236-8.
Further reading
- Biggart, John. "The Astrakhan Rebellion: An Episode in the Career of Sergey Mironovich Kirov", JSTOR 4207255.
- Conquest, Robert (1989). Stalin and the Kirov Murder. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505579-9.
External links
- Kirov Biography
- Leon Trotsky: On the Kirov Assassination
- "What Happened to Kirov's Statue in Baku?" Azerbaijan International, Vol. 9.2 (Summer 2001)
- Business catalog of Kirov town
- The son is not responsible for his father or is he?
- Newspaper clippings about Sergei Kirov in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW