The "Darling Of The Party" Is Murdered!


On December 1, 1934 Leonid Nikolajew ...



... an unemployed member of the Soviet Communist Party, shoots the Leningrad party leader Sergei Mironowitsch Kirow ...



... on the way to his office in the "Smolnij building" ...



... a former tsarist school for "higher daughters" that the Bolsheviks had confiscated as their party headquarters.



Kirow - also known as "the party's darling" - was extremely popular with broad sections of the population.

He was affable, good-looking, could listen, organized quickly and effectively - and ruthlessly antagonized grievances. Large parts of the party, especially in Leningrad (the strongest party organization in the country!), stood “like a man” behind him

Completely against his will, Kirow had thus become a rival of the "landlord" Jossif Stalin.



And so, after the murder, rumors quickly spread that Stalin himself had commissioned the assassination attempt in order to switch off the popular rival, because the latter was supposed to replace him as general secretary of the CPSU according to the wishes of some party functionaries.

Allegedly, at the 17th party congress, the “party congress of the winners”, in January 1934 even several hundred delegates voted against Stalin's election to the Central Committee, while Kirow was elected practically unanimously.

According to the statutes of the CPSU, with this election result Kirov would automatically have been "General Secretary" and thus party and de facto also head of state!

The next picture shows Kirov (front) during this party congress ...:



The fact is: The ballot papers for the party congress were destroyed immediately after the election on Stalin's orders - and Stalin rushed to be declared the winner of the election.

And there is an instructive quote from the owner of the house about elections: “The people who cast the votes do not decide anything. The people who count the votes decide everything. "

Rumors and facts about the murderer Nikolayew seemed to substantiate the view that the "father of the peoples" himself was behind the attack:

Nikolaew had already been arrested several times in the vicinity of Kirov as suspicious, but released again - at least once with the return of a weapon that he was carrying with him.

A "asocial element" (a phrase used at the time for the unemployed!) with a hidden weapon in the immediate vicinity of a member of the Communist Party Central Committee - normally that would have been enough for much more than just a longer stay in a torture room of the secret police!

But the "organs" not only immediately let Nikolajew go, they also courteously handed him the later murder weapon - this "Nagan" revolver!



Incidentally, the weapon is of exactly the same type that the Tshekists used ...:





Actually out of reach for ordinary people!

The day before the murder, Kirow's loyal bodyguard was "accidentally" run over by a truck that was never found - and neither was its driver!

In Stalin's total surveillance state, actually completely impossible!

In addition, the bodyguard was on the way to being interrogated by Stalin himself and an uninvolved witness to the "accident" died a little later under unexplained circumstances.

Whatever the case - Stalin himself intervened aggressively and directly in the investigations into the murder of Kirov, saw a "plot" against the party - which was the trigger for the "great purges", which in the years up to 1936 several million people fell victim.

The highest-ranking CPSU members among the victims were the five politburo members and candidates loyal to Stalin: Robert Eiche, Stanislaw Kossior, Pawel Postyshew, Jan Rudsutak and Wlas Tchubar.

Of the 139 members of the Central Committee, 98 were victims of the Great Terror, of the 1966 delegates of the XVII. Party congress of the CPSU (1934), called the “party convention of the victors”, was 1108.

The Komsomol, the party's youth organization, was also affected. 72 of the 93 members of the organization's central committee were arrested, 319 of the 385 regional secretaries and 2,210 of the 2,750 district secretaries.

In December 1934, 6,501 people were executed in Leningrad alone in response to the Kirov murder!

Noticeable here:

Of the 1,996 party members attending the 17th Congress (and witnesses to the electoral fraud) 1,108 were arrested and about two thirds were executed in the following three years.

90 percent of all Leningrad party cadres were imprisoned. The harassment of the Ukrainian party cadres after Nikita Khrushchev took over the chairmanship of the Communist Party of Ukraine in 1938 was similarly extensive. Only three of the 200 members of the Ukrainian Central Committee survived.

The murder squads also raged in the army:

3 of 5 marshals, 13 of 15 army commanders, 8 of 9 admirals, 50 of 57 corps generals, 154 of 186 division generals, all 16 political commissars assigned to the armies and 25 of the 28 political commissars belonging to the army corps lost their lives.

Of the marshals only Stalin's devoted Laikai Woroshilow (norn middle) and the senile Marshal Budjonnij (back left) were allowed to live ...:



Of the 139 ZK members and candidates elected during the party congress, 98 were murdered during the "purges". Of the remaining 41, only 24 were at the XVIII. CPSU party congress re-elected to the Central Committee.

Someone seems to have tried to cover their tracks!

On the other hand, the “landlord” shed a lot of “crocodile tears”: Kirow got a pompous funeral ...





... and shortly after the murder, the city of Jelisavetgrad in the Ukraine was first renamed "Kirowo" and in 1939 "Kirowograd". That's what it's called to this day.

And there is also a memorial there that commemorates Sergej Mironowitsch Kirow ...:



However, the landlord was wrong about one thing: Even after Sergei Kirow's extinction, his real popularity continued for a long time - during the Second World War, Soviet tankers wrote his name as a slogan on their tanks ...:

Every country has skeletons in it's closet, but the Soviet Union seems to have had a whole warehouse full! How did they manage to put up with Uncle Joe for so long??
Good post Martin. It is interesting to speculate how the Soviet Union would have fared under Kirov.

Phil

seemingly

No one!


Cheers