His death was the starting shot of the Great Terror
In his first year in Leningrad, 1926, Kirov toured the factories and spoke at more than 180 workers' meetings. He was the only Politburo member who addressed workers directly, in work-clothes, without a podium.
A Politburo member who led the Leningrad party from 1926 and drove its industrialization. A factory-floor orator beloved by workers, he was shot dead at the Smolny in December 1934. His death, together with the 'Law of 1 December,' became the starting shot of the Great Terror.
Career Timeline
- 1909–17Journalism and underground work in Vladikavkaz
- 1921–26First Secretary of Azerbaijan; rebuilds the Baku oilfields
- 1926Takes over Leningrad from Zinoviev’s machine
- 1930Full Politburo member
- 1934.12.1Shot by Nikolaev at the Smolny; the express-execution decree issued the same day
Related historical events
- 1918–1922The Civil War and Foreign InterventionCommander of Astrakhan military administration
- 1922.12Formation of the USSRAs Azerbaijan party first secretary, took part in forming the Transcaucasian Federation and the USSR
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationFirst Secretary of Leningrad Party Committee
- 1937–1938The Great PurgeThe murder that triggered the terrorHis 1934 assassination became the pretext for the Great Terror, and the later trials invoked his death as their justification.
1926, the Organizer Sent to Leningrad
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.
1 December 1934, the Shot at Smolny
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.