Sergei Mironovich Kirov

Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov was born on 27 March 1886 (15 March old style) in Urzhum, Vyatka Governorate. His parents had moved to Vyatka from Perm Governorate shortly before his birth, and the first four children of the family had died in infancy. In 1894 his father left to find work and disappeared without trace and his mother died; the surviving children were orphaned. The sisters were taken in by their grandmother while he was placed in a house of care for minor orphans, where he was raised until 1897, completing the Urzhum parish and town schools.

In autumn 1901 he went to Kazan and entered the lower mechanical-technical industrial school, funded by the zemstvo and the trustees' fund of the Urzhum town school; he graduated in 1904 with a first-degree award, among the top five of his year. That year he worked as a draughtsman in the Tomsk city administration and took preparatory courses at the Tomsk Technological Institute, and in November 1904 he joined the RSDLP in Tomsk under the party name "Serzh".

In 1905 he took part in a demonstration and was arrested; after leaving prison he led fighting squads. In July 1905 the Tomsk city party conference elected him to the Tomsk RSDLP committee, and in October 1905 he organized a strike at the large railway station at Taiga. In July 1906 he was arrested for keeping an illegal printing press and jailed in the Tomsk fortress for a year and a half. The prison library was fairly well stocked with the legal writings of the time, but as he later recalled, the "savage sentences of courts" sent tens to the gallows, and on many a night the solitary block echoed with condemned men bidding farewell as they were led out to execution. "In general," he wrote, "it was immeasurably easier to study in prison than as an underground militant at liberty." From 1908 he was a professional revolutionary, working in Irkutsk and Novonikolaevsk.

He arrived in Vladikavkaz in 1909 and became a contributor to the North Caucasus newspaper Terek, publishing under the pseudonym Sergei Mironov. He acted in amateur performances and took up mountaineering: on 9 August 1910 he climbed Kazbek with the Ingush guide Yani Buzurtanov and published an account in Terek a month later, then Elbrus on 31 July 1911. There he met his future wife, Maria Lvovna Markus. In April 1912 Terek published the article "Across the Road", signed "S. Kirov" for the first time, the pseudonym under which he entered history.

On 11 August 1911 he was arrested in Vladikavkaz in the case of the Tomsk underground press and taken to Tomsk, where on 16 March 1912 the court acquitted him for lack of evidence: the police superintendent who had arrested him in 1906 failed to recognize him at the trial. He returned to Vladikavkaz in April 1912. Spartacus Educational, however, states that he was arrested once again in 1915, spent a year in custody and moved to the Caucasus only afterwards, joining the Bolsheviks after March 1917; this does not fit the Russian account's 1911–1912 dates, and the divergence is recorded here rather than resolved.

The official version of Soviet history presented him as a convinced Leninist before 1917. Recent research disputes this: he arrived at his final political platform gradually, at first sympathizing with the Mensheviks and supporting the Provisional Government, as he openly wrote in his articles, and came over to the Bolshevik side only after the October Revolution of 1917. In December 1917, during the counter-revolutionary rising in Vladikavkaz, he hid with the Ossetian Gatuov family at house No. 32 on Tarskaya Street, now Tsagolova Street.

Born into a poor family in Urzhum and raised in an orphanage, Sergei Kirov joined the revolutionary movement as a technical student in Tomsk and was tempered by underground work and newspaper journalism in the Caucasus. During the Civil War he organized the defence of Astrakhan, played a central role in establishing Soviet power in the Caucasus, and then led the party organization of Azerbaijan.

In 1926 the party sent him to Leningrad, the stronghold of the Zinoviev opposition. Kirov rebuilt the party organization by touring the factories one by one and speaking at workers' meetings, and his plain, forceful oratory won him genuine popularity among Leningrad's workers. Under his leadership Leningrad was reshaped into one of the key industrial bases of the First Five-Year Plan.

At the 17th Party Congress in early 1934, the so-called Congress of Victors, Kirov was among the speakers who drew the longest applause. Immediately after the congress he was elected a secretary of the Central Committee and was counted among the closest colleagues of the Stalin leadership.

On the afternoon of 1 December 1934, in a third-floor corridor of Smolny, the Leningrad party headquarters, Leonid Nikolaev fired a revolver into the back of Kirov's head. Nikolaev was an unemployed party member, once expelled and readmitted, who had been nursing personal grievance and frustration. Kirov died on the spot.

The claim that Stalin ordered the assassination circulated for decades from the Khrushchev era onward. But post-archival scholarship, above all Lenoe's exhaustive re-examination of the case together with the work of Khlevniuk and Kotkin, consistently concludes that no evidence exists anywhere in the archives that Stalin ordered the killing, and that Nikolaev acted alone. Successive investigative commissions convened in the Soviet and perestroika periods reached the same conclusion. The old rumor should now be regarded as unfounded.

The real consequences of the murder were heavy. On the evening of the assassination the Law of 1 December was promulgated, drastically shortening the investigation and trial of terrorism cases, and the arrest of Zinoviev and Kamenev on charges of moral responsibility opened the campaign against the former opposition. Kirov's death became, in a way he could never have wanted, a waystation on the road to the Great Terror. He was buried in the Kremlin Wall, and the city of Vyatka, renamed Kirov, along with countless streets, factories and a ballet company, took his name.