Did Stalin need to kill Kirov? Kirov's murder: will we ever know the truth? Ends in the water

80 years old ago, on December 1, 1934, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the party boss of Leningrad and the region, 48-year-old Sergei Mironovich Kirov (real name Kostrikov), was shot dead.

This drama is often compared to two other "crimes of the century". According to the plot - with the assassination of John Kennedy (in both cases, the direct perpetrators are known to be mentally unstable, but there are serious reasons to suspect a conspiracy). According to the consequences for the country - with the burning of the Reichstag.

The quick-witted people responded with a ditty: “Oh, my cucumbers, my tomatoes! Stalin killed Kirov in the corridor!” She was nicknamed the “ten-year-old” because for her execution she was automatically given 10 years in the camps.

On November 28, Kirov spent two and a half hours at a reception with Stalin. The content of the conversation is unknown, but, apparently, the meeting was routine.

On the evening of the 29th, they watched a performance together at the Moscow Art Theater and kissed goodbye.

Next time Stalin will kiss Kirov in his coffin.

Jealousy and politics

The second secretary of the regional committee, Mikhail Chudov, was having a meeting on the third floor of Smolny. At 16:37, the participants heard two shots, jumped out the door, looked into a short passage leading from the wide corridor at a right angle, leading to Kirov’s office, and saw the body of their boss on the floor, and next to him a man with a revolver in his hand.

The killer was hysterical and did not resist. They took away his weapons, his pass to Smolny and his party card in the name of Leonid Nikolaev.

This scene was described in detail by the former head of the regional financial department, Mikhail Roslyakov, who later survived the Gulag and left memories.

Kirov was going to work. Security guard Borisov followed him a few meters away (the boss didn’t like people breathing down his neck). Having turned into the corridor, the first secretary was left unaccompanied for several seconds, and Nikolaev, who was waiting, shot him in the head at point-blank range.

Was the illiterate and inept Nikolaev able to develop such a plan? Or is this the creation of a more experienced and sophisticated mind?

During interrogation, the criminal revealed that he killed out of jealousy. His wife, Estonian Milda Draule, a beautiful blonde, worked in the regional committee apparatus, periodically was on duty at night, and she was allegedly noticed by Kirov, a well-known admirer of the fair sex.

A few months before the murder, Draule was transferred to the office of the authorized People's Commissariat of Light Industry for the Leningrad Region, which, in light of the version of a secret connection, looked logical.

“Kirov is a man in the prime of his life. He probably showed signs of attention. But actually, this version was born later. And it seems to me that it was launched by the NKVD,” writes modern researcher of the Stalin era, Professor Vladimir Naumov.

It is possible that someone deliberately planted suspicion in Nikolaev’s soul and incited his jealousy.

Over the course of 15 years, Nikolaev changed eleven jobs. He was a classic loser, a nervous, easily manipulated man who was ideal for the role of a psychopathic killer.

At the time of the crime, he did not work anywhere and lived on his wife’s income. Party bodies were involved in his employment as a communist, but he rejected all offers, demanded more, wrote requests and applications addressed to Kirov.

On December 1, 2009, the FSB declassified Nikolaev’s personal diary, which was kept in the archives, from which it follows that he began preparing for murder in July 1934 and compared himself with the Narodnaya Volya member Zhelyabov.

Nikolaev did not mention the conspiracy and accomplices in his diary.

Inconsistencies

According to Lavrenty Beria's son Sergo, his father, having headed the NKVD, allegedly raised materials on the murder of Kirov and came to the conclusion that Nikolaev acted alone.

Everyone says: show me the paper where Stalin orders Yagoda to kill Kirov, preferably in Smolny on such and such a date. There are no such papers! They couldn't exist

But many circumstances make one doubt this.

Near Kirov’s house on Krasnykh Zori Street there was a constant crowd of complainants hoping to get their papers into his hands. From time to time they were taken to the police.

On October 15, Nikolaev was also caught in such a raid. An illegally stored revolver was found on him. The future killer was interrogated by the head of the security department of the top officials of the Leningrad NKVD department and inexplicably released on all four sides.

Subsequently, it became known that he was allowed to train in shooting at the sports base of the Dynamo society owned by the OGPU and the internal affairs bodies. There he also received the cartridges with which Kirov was killed.

Unemployed Nikolaev knew the location of the premises in Smolny, and Kirov’s habits, and the approximate time of his appearance, although he left on December 1 in the morning on business and initially did not plan to appear at work.

For some reason, the security guard who was constantly on duty at the door of the first secretary's office was absent.

Stalin, who arrived in Leningrad to personally lead the investigation, interrogated Nikolaev in a prison cell.

The old Bolshevik Olga Shatunovskaya, who worked on the commission created by Khrushchev to study the history of Stalin’s repressions, tracked down the prison guard who was present.

There is indirect evidence that convinces me that this was the act of a lone terrorist, a loser terrorist, an unfortunate person. But this is not an excuse for Stalin. In any case, Stalin used the murder of Kirov to the fullest and killed millions

According to Shatunovskaya, he testified that Nikolaev shouted: “The NKVD officers tore me down for four months, trying to prove that it was necessary to shoot Kirov in the name of the party’s cause! They promised to save my life, I agreed. And now they threw me behind bars, and I know that they won’t spare me!”

After the assassination attempt, Nikolaev did not live even a month. On December 28-29, a visiting session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, chaired by Vasily Ulrikh, considered the case in an accelerated manner legalized by that time and sentenced the killer and 13 of his “accomplices” to death.

The decision was announced at 05:45 am and carried out an hour later.

No one except Nikolaev admitted guilt, and he himself, according to the testimony of one of the guards given in the 1950s, upon hearing the verdict, shouted: “They deceived me!”

A close friend of the head of the Leningrad NKVD department, Philip Medved, a certain Sorokin, wrote to the CPSU Central Committee in the 1960s that Medved, shortly before his arrest, allegedly told him: “the ideological inspirer of the murder is Stalin, and the perpetrators are [People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Genrikh] Yagoda and [Bear's deputy Ivan] Zaporozhets."

Historian Leonid Mlechin asked one of the investigators in the murder case, Lev Sheinin: “Tell me frankly - did Stalin order the murder of Kirov?”

He smiled knowingly: “Stalin was a leader, not a bandit, my dear.”

Myths about Kirov

During the years of Khrushchev's "thaw" the image of "Mironych" was formed - a democrat and humanist, whom Leningraders allegedly loved madly.

Unlike Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich, he actually spoke a lot to the people, visiting factories on average every two days in his first year as secretary of the regional committee. But this did not improve the welfare of the workers.

Historian Edward Radzinsky quotes Kirov’s words: “The old groups of enemies were melted during the struggle for the Five-Year Plan, and they can no longer be taken into account,” which, according to the researcher, indicates his mood for reconciliation, not repression. It seems that Kirov offered Stalin to forgive and return to work one of the figures of the right opposition, Uglanov, and hosted Bukharin in Leningrad. But these are, firstly, nuances, and secondly, they concerned exclusively relations within the top.

In 1919, he, heading Soviet power in Astrakhan, ordered the shooting of the religious procession, and then the execution without trial of Metropolitan Mitrofan of Astrakhan and Bishop Leonty.

Kirov mercilessly carried out dispossession in the region entrusted to him, in close cooperation with the security officers he built the White Sea Canal with the hands of prisoners, and as a member of the “troika” of the Leningrad region for the consideration of cases of insurrection and counter-revolution, he signed hundreds of death sentences. Thousands of people of non-proletarian origin were evicted from the city under him.

He repeatedly repeated in public speeches: “Every member of the party must punch any oppositionist in the face.”

There are not even indirect hints of contradictions between Kirov and Stalin

The Kirov times could seem liberal only against the backdrop of the horror that followed his death.

Another myth is that Kirov was supposedly the number two man in the country and a dangerous competitor for Stalin.

“Kirov is in vain considered the leader of the liberal wing in the Politburo, a man who was expected to replace Stalin and who dared to argue with general secretary", says historian Oleg Khlevnyuk.

According to available data, the researcher points out, Kirov was an uninfluential figure in the Politburo, he rarely visited Moscow, he almost did not take part in the voting of the party elite, and all his interests were limited to Leningrad.

The well-known story that at the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in January-February 1934, many delegates allegedly voted against Stalin, and someone proposed electing Kirov as General Secretary, has no convincing confirmation.

“If Kirov had not been killed, he would have remained an insignificant figure in history,” says historian Leonid Mlechin.

“Kirov was not a major personality, and was not part of the leadership core around Stalin. Stalin chose a person who he did not really need, but was high in rank,” says Vladimir Naumov.

"Kirov Stream"

“Nikolaev could have killed Kirov several times,” notes Naumov. “He constantly carried weapons with him. But Kirov was killed in Smolny. How did it sound! Smolny is almost the Kremlin! The country shook.”

Repressions against " former people", intelligentsia, entrepreneurs, clergy and wealthy peasants, starting in 1917, did not stop for a day. But to give the terror an unprecedented scale, and, most importantly, to justify the reprisal of the largest party figures, Lenin’s comrades-in-arms, something stunning was required.

By the time of Kirov’s murder, the legislative framework had already been prepared, which made it possible to launch mass repressions. The entire range of punishments was prepared in advance. All I needed was a reason

Organizational preparations for the “great purge” began several months before Kirov’s murder. On July 10, the allied NKVD was created, and on November 5, the notorious Special Meeting with it. The sensational crime happened surprisingly at the right time.

According to the recollections of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, Stalin, having received news from Leningrad, immediately gathered his comrades-in-arms, and, although the investigation had not yet begun, confidently accused the Zinoviev opposition of the assassination attempt, cursing Yagoda, who reported that he was going to look for a conspiracy among the “hidden White Guards” and emigrants .

At the February-March 1937 plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the longest in the history of the party and entirely devoted to the fight against the “enemies of the people,” who had replaced Yagoda by that time, and in 1934, who worked as deputy chairman of the Party Control Commission, Yezhov told from the podium how Stalin corrected his “politically short-sighted” predecessor:

“Comrade Stalin, as I remember now, called me and said: “Look for murderers among the Zinovievites.” I must say that the security officers did not believe in this and, just in case, they insured themselves here and there along another line, along a foreign line, perhaps something will jump out there. At first, our relationship with the security officers was quite difficult. For the first time, the Central Committee appointed control. People could not digest this. Comrade Stalin called Yagoda and said: “Look, we’ll punch him in the face.”

On the night of December 1-2, the leader arrived in the northern capital, accompanied by Molotov, Voroshilov, Secretary of the Central Committee Andrei Zhdanov, who a few days later became Kirov’s successor, Prosecutor General Vyshinsky, Yezhov, Yagoda and his deputy Yakov Agranov.

Right on the platform, Stalin, without saying a word, hit the head of the regional department of the NKVD Medved, who was greeting the distinguished guests, in the face.

Then a fuss arose around the cleaning lady of one of the regional departments of the NKVD, Volkova, who allegedly reported to her superiors about the impending conspiracy and claimed that she went with Nikolaev to the German consulate, where he was given 25 thousand rubles. They decided not to develop the “German Trace,” but Stalin received Volkova, ordered to allocate her a separate apartment, and to arrest five security officers for loss of vigilance.

On December 4, just three days after the murder of Kirov, the famous resolution of the Presidium of the Central Election Commission was issued: cases on charges of state crimes should be considered expeditiously, petitions for pardon should not be accepted, and death sentences should be carried out immediately. The day after the execution of Nikolaev, Stalin sent to the members of the Politburo a document written in his own hand, “Lessons from the events associated with the villainous murder of Comrade Kirov,” which stated that the crime was committed on the direct orders of Zinoviev and Trotsky.

On December 16, Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested in Moscow and a month later received ten and five years in prison, respectively, and on August 24, 1936 they were sentenced to death “in connection with newly discovered circumstances.”

Then she appeared in court large group"Zinovievites", including the leaders of the St. Petersburg Bolsheviks Zalutsky and Shlyapnikov, who met Stalin in 1917 from Turukhansk exile, and one of the murderers of the royal family, Safarov. All received relatively mild sentences, but just like Zinoviev and Kamenev, they did not live long.

Ordinary people were not forgotten either. Ten days after the murder of Kirov, the regional department of the NKVD prepared a list of more than eleven thousand Leningraders who “did not inspire political confidence.” The arrests continued. This massive replenishment of the Gulag was nicknamed the “Kirov Stream.” Almost everyone was destroyed - those who knew what happened Vladimir Naumov, historian

Mother, brother, sisters were repressed, cousin and Nikolaev’s roommate.

Medved and Zaporozhets were sentenced to only three years in prison for negligence, and were sent to the Kolyma camps, where they were appointed to administrative positions and lived completely differently from other prisoners, but in 1937 they were shot without noise and publicity.

“N.S. Khrushchev, having familiarized himself with the conclusions of the commission, locked the final document in his safe and said: “As long as imperialism exists in the world, we cannot publish such a document,” wrote Olga Shatunovskaya in 1990 in a letter to the Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Alexander Yakovlev .

According to her, a number of materials, including the interrogation protocol of the guard who was present during Stalin’s conversation with Nikolaev, subsequently disappeared from the case.

00:09 — REGNUM On December 1, 1934, the head of the Leningrad party organization of the CPSU (b) was killed in Smolny Sergey Kirov(Kostrikov), closest ally Stalin. Someone was named as the killer Nikolaev, he was detained at the scene of the crime and interrogated many times. This event in different years special investigations were devoted law enforcement and historians. But no one knows the true picture and the true causes of the incident, as well as the real culprits.

Ilshat Mukhametyanov © REGNUM news agency

“I still cannot understand all the circumstances of Kirov’s death,” - the historian will write Egge Osmund, processed a huge number of available archival documents.

According to him, in many ways "ends don't meet", although the “Kirov case” served as a reason to deal with the remnants of the Zinoviev opposition. As the investigation progressed, different versions were developed - the “spy” version (Nikolaev admitted to trying to communicate with the Latvian, German and English consuls) and the “Trotskyist” version, according to which someone was planning the murder of Stalin and Kirov, which was supposed to lead to a coup d’etat. And nothing. All versions did not stand up to criticism when new facts appeared. Today, many experts are confident that the real picture of this murder on December 1, 1934 can only be recreated if absolutely all available documents from the Prosecutor General’s Office are requested and a professional investigation is carried out. Whether this is so is difficult to say. But today we will tell only about one meeting, which took place in the fall of 1977 in an apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt with Olga Grigorievna Shatunovskaya.

Professor Stishov's warning

In the mid-1970s, the author of this article was a graduate student at the Faculty of History of Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov. The topic of research was the problems of nationalist parties and movements in the Middle East and Transcaucasia in the 1918-1920s. Scientific supervisor - doctor historical sciences, Professor Mikhail Ivanovich Stishov. As the work progressed and the study of documents in archives, including those closed at that time, many questions arose that needed clarification. In this regard, Professor Stishov recommended contacting Shatunovskaya, with whom he was familiar from his previous activities. At that time, the following was known about Olga Grigorievna. She was born in 1901 in Baku into a Jewish family of lawyers. In 1916 she became a member of the RSDLP (b). After the February Revolution, she worked in the editorial office of the newspaper “Baku Worker”. During the days of the Baku Commune, she was in charge of the press bureau of the Baku Council of People's Commissars, and was the secretary of the head of the Baku Council of People's Commissars Shaumyan. In the 1918-1920s - at underground work in Transcaucasia.

As the conversation progressed, it became clear that Shatunovskaya was well acquainted not only with the Baku commissars, but also conducted secret correspondence with Moscow and communicated with many leaders of nationalist parties in Transcaucasia. I knew Stalin personally Mikoyan, Kirov, Molotov, and later had contacts with Trotsky. In November 1937, she was arrested on a false denunciation, as some historians now claim, authored by the party leader of Azerbaijan Bagirova. She was convicted on charges of participating in "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist organization" for 8 years ITL. She served her sentence in Kolyma. In August 1948, the USSR Ministry of State Security was sentenced to exile in a settlement in Yeniseisk; in the early 1950s she was in Krasnoyarsk. In 1954 she was summoned to Moscow, rehabilitated on May 24, 1954 by the Commission for the Review of Cases of Convicts and Exiles, and reinstated in the CPSU. In 1956-1962, a member of the CPC under the CPSU Central Committee, she dealt with issues related to the rehabilitation of the repressed; in 1960, she was included in the “Shvernik Commission”, created by the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee to investigate trials 1930s, including the “Kirov case.”

Stishov considered Shatunovskaya"convinced Trotskyist" and warned: “Every fact she reports requires serious archival verification.”

Olga Grigorievna did not object to the author recording the conversation with her. Then we came up with a plan to eventually publish her memoirs. However, Shatunovskaya’s daughter opposed it, hoping to publish these memoirs abroad, which happened later - in Germany. But our records, although fragmentary, have been preserved, and much has been remembered. Thus, Shatunovskaya claimed that in 1918 “It was Stalin who betrayed Shaumyan by refusing to send military aid to the Baku commune from Astrakhan” that in the 1920s and 30s the entire Transcaucasian party organization was under the influence of Trotsky, who collected political dirt on Stalin in the archives.

But the main thing was that Shatunovskaya brought every conversation to the “Kirov case,” which she dealt with on a personal behalf Nikita Khrushchev in the “Shvernik Commission”, which included the Prosecutor General Rudenko, Chairman of the KGB Shelepin and head of the department of administrative bodies of the CPSU Central Committee Mironov.

“Khrushchev told me that it was necessary to prove Stalin’s involvement in the murder of Kirov,” - said Olga Grigorievna.

She gained access to Stalin’s personal archive and the Politburo archive, and discovered a piece of paper on which the leader himself depicted two terrorist centers - Moscow and Leningrad. She claimed that Stalin first Zinoviev And Kameneva placed them in the Leningrad center, then crossed them out and moved them to the Moscow one. But even then it became clear that the commission did not have a set of necessary documents and facts, and Shvernik began to interfere with the investigation.

This happened, according to Shatunovskaya, when they began to study the materials of the 17th Congress, after which all members of the counting commission were shot. Allegedly, at this congress, Kirov was supposed to replace Stalin, against whom 292 people voted, and only three against Kirov. But this is only from the words of one of the eyewitnesses of the events.

“I was fully confident that the results of our work would be made public at the XXII Congress, - said Shatunovskaya. — But Khrushchev began to say in his report, as in 1956, that everything must be investigated and published. Although everything was already ready for publication. I then went to Khrushchev. I began to convince her that this was wrong. He answered me: “If we publish this, we will undermine confidence in ourselves, in our party in the world communist movement.” And so, they say, after the 20th Congress there were great fluctuations. And that’s why we won’t publish anything now, but will return to this in fifteen years. I said: “In politics, postponing a decision for fifteen years means digging a hole under your feet. But he stuck to his guns. And so they put everything in the archive.”

After this, Shatunovskaya had to leave, according to her, at the insistence Suslova from the Central Committee, leaving 64 volumes of materials and documents for storage in the party archive. At the time of the conversation with Shatunovskaya, the “non-disclosure” subscription she had given was still in force, and the author knew nothing about Olga Grigorievna’s prepared memorandum to the Politburo. But this note was preserved, and it was published. It does not contain categorical conclusions, although it points to the identified inconsistency of certain facts in the circumstances of Kirov’s murder. However, the question is still different. It was Shatunovskaya’s version that was actively supported by Western Sovietologists, who published her Memoirs. In them, in particular, a letter from Shatunovskaya to Khrushchev, written on May 22, 1962, was published. It said the following:

“When handing over, before leaving the Party Control Committee, important documents collected during the study of the circumstances of the murder of Comrade Kirov, I consider it my duty to tell you that special attention deserves the following: in the period after the XX, as well as after the XXII Party Congresses, the Party Control Committee received a number of materials convincingly indicating that the villainous murder of Comrade Kirov was organized by Stalin 10 months after the XVII Congress, due to the fact that during this Congress, a number of leading figures of our party negotiated with Sergei Mironovich about moving Stalin from the post of General Secretary to the post of Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (instead of Molotov) and on the nomination of Comrade Kirov as general (or first) secretary. These negotiations were based on the opinion of many leaders that Stalin was striving for autocracy in the party, using the party’s struggle against the opposition for this, and therefore it was necessary to fulfill Lenin’s will to remove Stalin from the post of General Secretary. These negotiations became known to Stalin, which prompted him to kill Kirov, and then exterminate the majority of the Central Committee and the activists of our party.”

But in 1964, another check was carried out on the circumstances of Kirov’s murder. But the certificate of its results has not yet been found. In 1990, during an investigation conducted by the prosecutor's investigation team The USSR Prosecutor's Office, the Main Military Prosecutor's Office and the State Security Committee of the USSR, together with employees of the Party Control Committee under the CPSU Central Committee, gave the following conclusion:

“In these cases there is no information about preparation in 1928-1934. the attempt on Kirov’s life, as well as the involvement of the NKVD and Stalin in this crime is not contained.”

On December 1, 2009, Nikolaev’s diary was declassified. According to the records, he decided to take revenge on Kirov for his dismissal from the Institute of Party History, after which he became unemployed. Nikolaev himself compared himself to a murderer Alexander II by Andrey Zhelyabov.

Illustration copyright RIA Novosti

80 years ago, on December 1, 1934, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the party boss of Leningrad and the region, 48-year-old Sergei Mironovich Kirov (real name Kostrikov), was shot dead.

This drama is often compared to two other "crimes of the century". According to the plot - with the assassination of John Kennedy (in both cases, the direct perpetrators are known to be mentally unstable, but there are serious reasons to suspect a conspiracy). According to the consequences for the country - with the burning of the Reichstag.

The murder happened surprisingly “on time”, becoming the trigger and justification for the Great Terror.

The quick-witted people responded with a ditty: “Oh, my cucumbers, my tomatoes! Stalin killed Kirov in the corridor!” She was nicknamed the “ten-year-old” because for her execution she was automatically given 10 years in the camps.

On November 28, Kirov spent two and a half hours at a reception with Stalin. The content of the conversation is unknown, but, apparently, the meeting was routine.

On the evening of the 29th, they watched a performance together at the Moscow Art Theater and kissed goodbye.

Next time Stalin will kiss Kirov in his coffin.

Jealousy and politics

The second secretary of the regional committee, Mikhail Chudov, was having a meeting on the third floor of Smolny. At 16:37, the participants heard two shots, jumped out the door, looked into a short passage leading from the wide corridor at a right angle, leading to Kirov’s office, and saw the body of their boss on the floor, and next to him a man with a revolver in his hand.

The killer was hysterical and did not resist. They took away his weapons, his pass to Smolny and his party card in the name of Leonid Nikolaev.

This scene was described in detail by the former head of the regional financial department, Mikhail Roslyakov, who later survived the Gulag and left memories.

Kirov was going to work. Security guard Borisov followed him a few meters away (the boss didn’t like people breathing down his neck). Having turned into the corridor, the first secretary was left unaccompanied for several seconds, and Nikolaev, who was waiting, shot him in the head at point-blank range.

Was the illiterate and inept Nikolaev able to develop such a plan? Or is this the creation of a more experienced and sophisticated mind? Leonid Mlechin, historian

During interrogation, the criminal revealed that he killed out of jealousy. His wife, Estonian Milda Draule, a beautiful blonde, worked in the regional committee apparatus, periodically was on duty at night, and she was allegedly noticed by Kirov, a well-known admirer of the fair sex.

A few months before the murder, Draule was transferred to the office of the authorized People's Commissariat of Light Industry for the Leningrad Region, which, in light of the version of a secret connection, looked logical.

“Kirov is a man in the prime of his life. He probably showed signs of attention. But actually, this version was born later. And it seems to me that it was launched by the NKVD,” writes modern researcher of the Stalin era, Professor Vladimir Naumov.

It is possible that someone deliberately planted suspicion in Nikolaev’s soul and incited his jealousy.

Over the course of 15 years, Nikolaev changed eleven jobs. He was a classic loser, a nervous, easily manipulated man who was ideal for the role of a psychopathic killer.

At the time of the crime, he did not work anywhere and lived on his wife’s income. Party bodies were involved in his employment as a communist, but he rejected all offers, demanded more, wrote requests and applications addressed to Kirov.

On December 1, 2009, the FSB declassified Nikolaev’s personal diary, which was kept in the archives, from which it follows that he began preparing for murder in July 1934 and compared himself with the Narodnaya Volya member Zhelyabov.

Nikolaev did not mention the conspiracy and accomplices in his diary.

Inconsistencies

According to Lavrenty Beria's son Sergo, his father, having headed the NKVD, allegedly raised materials on the murder of Kirov and came to the conclusion that Nikolaev acted alone.

Everyone says: show me the paper where Stalin orders Yagoda to kill Kirov, preferably in Smolny on such and such a date. There are no such papers! They couldn’t have been Vladimir Naumov, historian

But many circumstances make one doubt this.

Near Kirov’s house on Krasnykh Zori Street there was a constant crowd of complainants hoping to get their papers into his hands. From time to time they were taken to the police.

On October 15, Nikolaev was also caught in such a raid. An illegally stored revolver was found on him. The future killer was interrogated by the head of the security department of the top officials of the Leningrad NKVD department and inexplicably released on all four sides.

Subsequently, it became known that he was allowed to train in shooting at the sports base of the Dynamo society owned by the OGPU and the internal affairs bodies. There he also received the cartridges with which Kirov was killed.

Unemployed Nikolaev knew the location of the premises in Smolny, and Kirov’s habits, and the approximate time of his appearance, although he left on December 1 in the morning on business and initially did not plan to appear at work.

For some reason, the security guard who was constantly on duty at the door of the first secretary's office was absent.

“I don’t understand at all how a stranger could hang out in this corridor, where everyone is visible. This is a special zone. Why didn’t anyone pay attention to Nikolaev, didn’t ask him - what are you doing here?” - Vladimir Naumov is perplexed.

Stalin, who arrived in Leningrad to personally lead the investigation, interrogated Nikolaev in a prison cell.

The old Bolshevik Olga Shatunovskaya, who worked on the commission created by Khrushchev to study the history of Stalin’s repressions, tracked down the prison guard who was present.

There is indirect evidence that convinces me that this was the act of a lone terrorist, a loser terrorist, an unfortunate person. But this is not an excuse for Stalin. In any case, Stalin used the murder of Kirov to the fullest and killed millions Oleg Khlevnyuk, historian

According to Shatunovskaya, he testified that Nikolaev shouted: “The NKVD officers tore me down for four months, trying to prove that it was necessary to shoot Kirov in the name of the party’s cause! They promised to save my life, I agreed. And now they threw me behind bars, and I know that they won’t spare me!”

After the assassination attempt, Nikolaev did not live even a month. On December 28-29, a visiting session of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court, chaired by Vasily Ulrikh, considered the case in an accelerated manner legalized by that time and sentenced the killer and 13 of his “accomplices” to death.

The decision was announced at 05:45 am and carried out an hour later.

No one except Nikolaev admitted guilt, and he himself, according to the testimony of one of the guards given in the 1950s, upon hearing the verdict, shouted: “They deceived me!”

A close friend of the head of the Leningrad NKVD department, Philip Medved, a certain Sorokin, wrote to the CPSU Central Committee in the 1960s that Medved, shortly before his arrest, allegedly told him: “the ideological inspirer of the murder is Stalin, and the perpetrators are [People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs Genrikh] Yagoda and [Bear's deputy Ivan] Zaporozhets."

One of the investigators in the murder case, Lev Sheinin, was asked in the 1950s: did Stalin order Kirov to be killed?

“Comrade Stalin is not a godfather to express himself in such a way,” Sheinin replied. “He proceeded from the fact that those around him should understand him correctly. And whoever did not understand, disappeared himself.”

Myths about Kirov

During the years of Khrushchev's "thaw" the image of "Mironych" was formed - a democrat and humanist, whom Leningraders allegedly loved madly.

Unlike Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich, he actually spoke a lot to the people, visiting factories on average every two days in his first year as secretary of the regional committee. But this did not improve the welfare of the workers.

Historian Edward Radzinsky quotes Kirov’s words: “The old groups of enemies were melted during the struggle for the Five-Year Plan, and they can no longer be taken into account,” which, according to the researcher, indicates his mood for reconciliation, not repression. It seems that Kirov offered Stalin to forgive and return to work one of the figures of the right opposition, Uglanov, and hosted Bukharin in Leningrad. But these are, firstly, nuances, and secondly, they concerned exclusively relations within the top.

There is no evidence that Kirov wanted to soften the course, make life easier for the working people, and in general diverged in some way from the general line.

In 1919, he, heading the Soviet government in Astrakhan, ordered the shooting of the religious procession, and then the execution without trial of Metropolitan Mitrofan of Astrakhan and Bishop Leonty.

Kirov mercilessly carried out dispossession in the region entrusted to him, in close cooperation with the security officers he built the White Sea Canal with the hands of prisoners, and as a member of the “troika” of the Leningrad region for the consideration of cases of insurrection and counter-revolution, he signed hundreds of death sentences. Thousands of people of non-proletarian origin were evicted from the city under him.

He repeatedly repeated in public speeches: “Every member of the party must punch any oppositionist in the face.”

There are not even indirect hints of contradictions between Kirov and Stalin Oleg Khlevnyuk, historian

The Kirov times could seem liberal only against the backdrop of the horror that followed his death.

Another myth is that Kirov was supposedly the number two man in the country and a dangerous competitor for Stalin.

“Kirov is in vain considered the leader of the liberal wing in the Politburo, a man who was expected to replace Stalin and who dared to argue with the General Secretary,” says historian Oleg Khlevnyuk.

According to available data, the researcher points out, Kirov was an uninfluential figure in the Politburo, he rarely visited Moscow, he almost did not take part in the voting of the party elite, and all his interests were limited to Leningrad.

The well-known story that at the XVII Congress of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in January-February 1934, many delegates allegedly voted against Stalin, and someone proposed electing Kirov as General Secretary, has no convincing confirmation.

“If Kirov had not been killed, he would have remained an insignificant figure in history,” says historian Leonid Mlechin.

“Kirov was not a major personality, and was not part of the leadership core around Stalin. Stalin chose a person who he did not really need, but was high in rank,” says Vladimir Naumov.

"Kirov Stream"

“Nikolaev could have killed Kirov several times,” notes Naumov. “He constantly carried weapons with him. But Kirov was killed in Smolny. How did it sound! Smolny is almost the Kremlin! The country shook.”

The repressions against “former people,” the intelligentsia, entrepreneurs, clergy and wealthy peasants, which began in 1917, did not stop for a day. But to give the terror an unprecedented scale, and, most importantly, to justify the reprisal against the largest figures of the party, Lenin’s comrades-in-arms, something stunning was required.

By the time of Kirov’s murder, the legislative framework had already been prepared, which made it possible to launch mass repressions. The entire range of punishments was prepared in advance. All they needed was a reason Vladimir Naumov, historian

Organizational preparations for the “great purge” began several months before Kirov’s murder. On July 10, the allied NKVD was created, and on November 5, the notorious Special Meeting with it. The sensational crime happened surprisingly at the right time.

According to the recollections of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, Stalin, having received news from Leningrad, immediately gathered his comrades-in-arms, and, although the investigation had not yet begun, confidently accused the Zinoviev opposition of the assassination attempt, cursing Yagoda, who reported that he was going to look for a conspiracy among the “hidden White Guards” and emigrants .

At the February-March 1937 plenum of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, the longest in the history of the party and entirely devoted to the fight against the “enemies of the people,” who had replaced Yagoda by that time, and in 1934, who worked as deputy chairman of the Party Control Commission, told from the podium how Stalin corrected his “politically short-sighted” predecessor:

“Comrade Stalin, as I remember now, called me and said: “Look for murderers among the Zinovievites.” I must say that the security officers did not believe in this and, just in case, they insured themselves here and there along another line, along a foreign line, perhaps something will jump out there. At first, our relationship with the security officers was quite difficult. For the first time, the Central Committee appointed control. People could not digest this. Comrade Stalin called Yagoda and said: “Look, we’ll punch him in the face.”

On the night of December 1-2, the leader arrived in the northern capital, accompanied by Molotov, Voroshilov, Secretary of the Central Committee Andrei Zhdanov, who a few days later became Kirov’s successor, Prosecutor General Vyshinsky, Yezhov, Yagoda and his deputy Yakov Agranov.

Right on the platform, Stalin, without saying a word, hit the head of the regional department of the NKVD Medved, who was greeting the distinguished guests, in the face.

Then a fuss arose around the cleaning lady of one of the regional departments of the NKVD, Volkova, who allegedly reported to her superiors about the impending conspiracy and claimed that she went with Nikolaev to the German consulate, where he was given 25 thousand rubles. They decided not to develop the “German Trace,” but Stalin received Volkova, ordered to allocate her a separate apartment, and to arrest five security officers for loss of vigilance.

On December 4, just three days after the murder of Kirov, the famous resolution of the Presidium of the Central Election Commission was issued: cases on charges of state crimes should be considered expeditiously, petitions for pardon should not be accepted, and death sentences should be carried out immediately.

Nikolaev certainly did not belong to Zinoviev’s group. He was an abnormal person, suffering from delusions of grandeur Genrikh Lyushkov, a prominent security officer, participant in the investigation

The day after the execution of Nikolaev, Stalin sent to the members of the Politburo a document written in his own hand, “Lessons from the events associated with the villainous murder of Comrade Kirov,” which stated that the crime was committed on the direct orders of Zinoviev and Trotsky.

On December 16, Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested in Moscow and a month later received ten and five years in prison, respectively, and on August 24, 1936 they were sentenced to death “in connection with newly discovered circumstances.”

At the same time, a large group of “Zinovievites” appeared before the court, including the leaders of the St. Petersburg Bolsheviks Zalutsky and Shlyapnikov, who met Stalin in 1917 from Turukhansk exile, and one of the murderers of the royal family, Safarov. All received relatively mild sentences, but just like Zinoviev and Kamenev, they did not live long.

Ordinary people were not forgotten either. Ten days after the murder of Kirov, the regional department of the NKVD prepared a list of more than eleven thousand Leningraders who “did not inspire political confidence.” The arrests continued. This massive replenishment of the Gulag was nicknamed the “Kirov Stream.”

So the citizens of the USSR should have “shuddered” out of fear for themselves.

Ends in the water

Security guard Borisov survived the boss by only a day. The car in which he was taken for interrogation was involved in an accident. The speed did not exceed 30 km/h, no one else was injured, but Borisov’s head was crushed.

Almost everyone was destroyed - those who knew what happened Vladimir Naumov, historian

Nikolaev’s mother, brother, sisters, cousin and roommate were repressed.

Medved and Zaporozhets were sentenced to only three years in prison for negligence, and were sent to the Kolyma camps, where they were appointed to administrative positions and lived completely differently from other prisoners, but in 1937 they were shot without noise and publicity.

“N.S. Khrushchev, having familiarized himself with the conclusions of the commission, locked the final document in his safe and said: “As long as imperialism exists in the world, we cannot publish such a document,” wrote Olga Shatunovskaya in 1990 in a letter to the Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Alexander Yakovlev .

According to her, a number of materials, including the interrogation protocol of the guard who was present during Stalin’s conversation with Nikolaev, subsequently disappeared from the case.

December 1, 1934 It is now known exactly what Kirov did on that fateful day and what he did not do. And also what his killer did. And, no matter what they write about investigative examination, sperm on underpants, etc., so far there is no reason to doubt these data... As of December 1,