The Murder of Sergei Kirov – History, Scholarship and the Anti-Stalin Paradigm

439 Pages·2013·145.871 MB·English

by  Grover Furr

T h e M u r d e r o f
Sergei Kirov
History, Scholarship and the
Anti-Stalin Paradigtn
By Grover Furr
Erythros Press and Media, LLC
Corrected Edition, November
2013
The Murder of Sergei Kirov: History, Scholarship and the Anti-Stalin
Paradigm
First English Edition 2013
Published in Russian by lzdatel'skii Dom "Russkaia Panorama" in 2013
under the title Ubfystvo Kirova. Novae rassledovanie.
Published by
Erythros Press and Media, LLC
PO Box 291994
Kettering, Ohio 45429-0994
USA
©Grover Furr 2012, 2013
Published and printed with permission of the author, who assumes all
responsibility for the content herein.
Localfy Assigned LC-type Call Number
Furr, Grover C. (Grover Carr)
The Murder of Sergei Kirov: History, Scholarship and the Anti-Stalin
Paradigm I Grover C. Furr; translations by Grover C. Furr
ISBN: 978-0-615-80201-5
434 p. Includes index.
1. Kirov, Sergei Mironovich, 1886-1934. 2. Revolutionaries-Soviet Un
ion. 3. Stalin, Joseph, 1879-1953. 4. Soviet Union-Politics and govem
ment-1917-1936. 5. Soviet Union-Politics and government-1936-
1953. 6. Soviet Union-Politics and government-1953-1985. 6. Soviet
Union --Politics and government-1985-1991. 7. Russia-Politics and
government. I. Title.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements and Dedication ............................................................... 1
List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................ 2
Introduction. ...................................................................................................... 3
Chapter 1. Kirilina ........................................................................................... 13
Chapter 2. Lenoe's Introduction ................................................................... 32
Chapter 3. Lenoe's Errors .............................................................................. 47
Chapter 4. Fallacies and Errors in Lenoe's Argumentation ...................... 77
Chapter 5. Lenoe and the Fallacy of 'Begging the Question' ................ 101
Chapter 6. The Leningrad and Moscow Centers ...................................... 114
Chapter 7. The Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites ........................................ 131
Chapter 8. Nikolaev's First Confession ..................................................... 142
Chapter 9. Stalin's Remark to "Target the Zinovievites" ....................... 161
Chapter 10. Iurii Sedov, "Reliable Researcher'' ........................................ 183
Chapter 11. Documents Lenoe Ignores ..................................................... 191
Chapter 12. Evidence Lenoe Ignores: Kirov Murder to 1936 Trial ...... 218
Chapter 13. Evidence Lenoe Ignores - The First Moscow Trial .......... 236
Chapter 14. Evidence Lenoe Ignores -The Second and Third Moscow
Trials ................................................................................................................ 260
Chapter 15. Iagoda's Confession ................................................................ 283
Chapter 16. Bukharin and Kotolynov ........................................................ 315
Chapter 17 Liushkov's Essay ....................................................................... 336
Chapter 18. Enukidze and the "Lone Gunman" Story ........................... 359
Chapter 19. Osmund Egge ........................................................................... 374
Chapter 20. Conclusion: The Logic of the Evidence ............................... 396
Appendix One - The Issue of Torture ...................................................... 409
Appendix Two - Texts of Primary Documents Ignored by All Previous
Writers ............................................................................................................. 422
Bibliography and Sources ............................................................................. 424
Index ................................................................................................................ 425
Acknowledgements and Dedication
Once again, I would like to express my continuing gratitude to Kevin
Prendergast and Arthur Hudson, Inter-Library Loan librarians at Harry S.
Sprague Library, Montclair State University.
Their tireless efforts to obtain hard-to-find articles and books in many
languages make my research possible.
*****
I dedicate this book to Susana Magdalena Sotillo, Ph.D., dedicated
scholar and teacher, incisive and supportive critic, mi compaiiera y mi cama
rada, with all my love and respect.
Without y.our encouragement and support this work would never have
been undertaken.
List of Abbreviations
Egge: Egge, Osmund. Zagadka Kirova. .Ub!Jstvo, razyiazavshee stalinskii
teTTOr. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2011.
Kirilina: Kirilina, Alla. Neizvest'!Yi Kirov. St Petersburg: "Neva"; Moscow:
"Olma-Press", 2001.
Lenoe: Lenoe, Matthew. The Kirov Murder and Soviet History. New Ha
ven: Yale U.P. 2010.
Lubianka 1922-1936: Lubianka. Stalin i VChK-GPU-OGPU-NKVD.
IAnvar' 1922 -dekabr' 1936. Moscow: IDF, 2003
Lubianka 1937-1938: Lubianka. Stalin i Glavnoe Upravlenie
Gosbezopasnosti NKVD. 1937-1938. Moscow: "Materik", 2004.
RKEB 1: Reabilitatsiia: K.ak Eto Bylo. Mart 1953 - Fevral' 1956 gg.
Dokumenry Prezjdiuma TsK KPSS i Drugie Materiafy. Moscow:
Mezhdunarodniy Fond "Demokratiia", 2000.
RKEB 2: R.eabilitatsiia. K.ak Eto Bylo. Febra/ 1956 -nachalo 80-kh godov.
T. 2. Moscow: "Materik", 2003.
RKEB 3: R.eabilitatsiia. K.ak Eto Bylo. Seredina 80-kh godov - 1991. Do
kumenry. T. 3. Moscow: "Materik", 2004.
R-PP: R.eabilitatsia: Politicheskie Protses-!Y 30-x -50-x gg. Moscow: Izda
tel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1991.
Introduction.
The basic facts have never been seriously disputed. At about 4:30 p.m. on
December 1, 1934 Sergei Mironovich Kirov, First Secretary of the All
Union Communist Party (Bolshevik)1 of Leningrad ob/ast' (province) and
city, entered the Smolny Institute, headquarters of the Bolshevik Party.
Kirov mounted the stairs and walked along the corridor of the third floor
towards his office. Leonid Vasil'evich Nikolaev, an unemployed Party
member, was standing in the hallway. Nikolaev allowed Kirov to pass by
and then rushed towards him from behind, took out a pistol, and shot
Kirov in the back of the skull. Nikolaev then tried to shoot himself in the
head but missed and fell in a faint on the floor a few feet from Kirov's
body.
Nikolaev was seized on the spot. From this point on there is little agree
ment.
Either late that night or sometime the next day his interrogations began.
At first Nikolaev seems to have claimed that he had killed Kirov on his
own, without any accomplices, in order to draw attention to what he felt
was unfair treatment of himself. Within two or three days he began to,
hint that others were involved. Before a week was out Nikolaev had ad
mitted that he was part of a conspiracy by a clandestine group of Party
members opposed to Joseph Stalin and favoring Grigorii Zinoviev, Len
ingrad First Secretary before Kirov.
NKVD investigators now turned their attention on this group. Interroga
tions of those Nikolaev had named, and then of the persons named by
those men, led to a number of partial and a few fuller confessions. Three
weeks after the murder fourteen men were indicted for conspiracy to kill
Kirov. They were tried on December 28-29, convicted, and executed
immediately. Meanwhile, Nikolaev's brother Piotr and wife Mil'da Draule
1 In Russian the Party's title was ''VKP(b)" (Vsesoiuznaia Kommunisticheskaia Partiia
(bolshevikov), or "All-Union Communist Party (bolshevik)"; informally, it was still re
ferred to as the "Bolshevik Party'', ''Bolsheviks", etc.
4 The Murder of Sergei Kirov: History, Scholarship and the .\nti-Stalin Paradigm
had made more and more self-incriminating confessions. In March 1935
Draule was tried, convicted, and executed.
*****
The larger significance of the Kirov murder unfolded only gradually dur
ing the next three years. The threads that bound the Kirov conspirators
to Zinoviev and Kamenev, followed up by NKVD investigators, led to
the three Moscow "Show Trials" of 1936, 1937 and 1938, and to the trial
of the military commanders known as the ''Tukhachevsky Affair" of
1937. This last led in turn to the "Ezhovshchina", also known as the
"Great Terror" of 1937-1938, during which some hundreds of thousands
of Soviet citizens, most certainly innocent, were arrested and executed,
with many others being imprisoned.
On March 5, 1953 Joseph Stalin died. Within months Nikita Khrushchev
had become the most powerful leader of the Soviet Union. Before Stalin
had been dead many months Khrushchev began organizing a campaign
to attack Stalin. A major part of this effort was to declare that Stalin had
fabricated false cases against all the defendants of the Moscow Trials and
Tukhachevsky Affair.
Khrushchev hinted at these things in his famous "Secret Speech" of Feb
ruary 25, 1956. In the same speech he also cast doubt on the official ver
sion of the Kirov assassination. Within the party leadership Khrushchev
and his men promoted the "rehabilitations" of a great many persons who
had been executed during the 1930s, including some of the Moscow Trial
defendants. Khrushchev and his men tried hard to find any evidence they
could to prove that Stalin had been behind Kirov's murder. But they
were unable to do so, and so at length settled for a story that Nikolaev
had acted on his own.
The version that Stalin had caused Kirov to be killed continued to circu
late, becoming widely believed both inside and outside the Soviet Union.
Outside Russia the "Stalin did it'' version continued for a while thanks to
books by two well-known anticommunist writers: Robert Conquest, who
wrote Stalin and the Kirov Murder in 1989, and Amy Knight, author of Who
Killed Kirov? (1997). Both these works rely heavily on rumors and hearsay.
Introduction. 5
During the Gorbachev period another attempt was made by highly
placed Party officials to promote the view that Stalin had killed Kirov.
This attempt also failed due to the utter lack of evidence to support it.
Since 1990 the view officially accepted in Russia has been that Nikolaev
acted alone, and that Stalin "used" Kirov's murder to frame former or
putative rivals, forcing them to admit to crimes they had never commit
ted, and executing them and, ultimately, many thousands more.
In 1993 Alla Kirilina's book Rikoshet appeared. Kirilina was long the head
of the Kirov Museum in Leningrad, an official government position that
gave her great familiarity with Kirov, his life and his death. This study
contains references to a modest number of primary sources and even
reprints a few of them. In 2001 this book was republished as the third
part of Kirilina's much longer study NeiZJ!estnyi /(jrov ("'Ibe Unknown
Kirov").
In the Fall of 2010 American historian Matthew Lenoe published The
J(jrov Murder and Soviet History, a mammoth 800-page work under the aegis
of the prestigious Yale University Press series "Annals of Communism."
While Lenoe acknowledges his debt to Kirilina's work, his book is much
longer, with many more references to primary sources. While Kirilina's
book is more discursive in nature Lenoe's is, or appears to be, evidence
based. It contains translations, complete or partial, of 127 documents. A
number of these are primary sources for the Kirov murder investigation.
The Problem
Both Kirilina's and Lenoe's books contain evidence - the texts of many
primary documents and references to yet others. Both arrive at the same
conclusion: that Kirov's assassin Nikolaev was a ''lone gunman" and that
everyone else accused of complicity in the murder was "framed", falsely
accused, forced to give false confessions incriminating themselves and
others.
If Kirilina's book, or the more recent and much more detailed work by
Lenoe, had solved the Kirov murder the present study would be largely
superfluous. But any attentive reader will notice immediately that neither
Kirilina nor Lenoe proves this case at all. Though they cite a large num
ber of primary sources only two of those documents in any way support
the hypothesis that Nikolaev was a "lone gunman". There are serious
6 The Murder of Sergei Kirov: History, Scholarship and the Anti-Stalin Paradigm
problems with both of these documents. All of the other primary docu
ments support the original conclusion reached at the time by the Soviet
investigators of the NKVD, the Soviet prosecution, and the court: that
Nikolaev was part of a clandestine Zinovievite terrorist conspiracy linked
with other similar conspiratorial groups.
In the present study our goal has been to solve the Kirov murder case.
Towards this end we review all the evidence as objectively as possible,
with appropriate skepticism, and without any preconceived conclusion in
mind. The main conclusion of our study is that Nikolaev was not a "lone
gunman" at all. The Soviet investigators and prosecution got it right in
December 1934. A clandestine Zinovievite conspiratorial organization, of
which Nikolaev was a member, killed Kirov.
The only sensible way to approach the Kirov murder is to begin with
Kirilina's and Lenoe's studies. These two books set forth the present
state of research on this question. Each contains much valuable eviden
tiary material that any future student must take fully into account. We
study each of these works with great care, Kirilina's in one chapter,
Lenoe's far longer and more ambitious work in several chapters. We ex
pose in detail the very considerable - ultimately, fatal - flaws in each of
them.
It is our conclusion that both authors began with the preconceived idea
that is also the official position of the Russian government today, as it
was of the Gorbachev regime that preceded it: that Nikolaev alone was
guilty and everyone else was "framed." This conclusion is contradicted by
virtually all the evidence, as our careful study of that evidence shows. We
examine and reveal the errors Kirilina and Lenoe make in reaching their
erroneous conclusion, exposing their faulty reasoning and use of primary
sources.
We also draw upon much evidence that is directly relevant to the Kirov
case but that neither Kirilina nor Lenoe used. It may not be coincidental
that all of this evidence supports the hypothesis that Nikolaev was part of
a Zinovievite conspiracy - that is, the conclusion drawn by the Soviet
prosecution and courts in the 1930s.
We do not try to account for the fact that Kirilina and Lenoe make a
large number of faulty suppositions, errors of reasoning and argumenta
tion, and omissions in their consideration of relevant evidence. It is hard