He Almost Replaced Stalin

...Although Knight is a meticulous researcher who delivers a sprightly narrative, I found her account of the murder itself the least interestingpart of her book —probably because this ground has been worked over so many times since the appearance 60 years ago of Boris I. Nicolaevsky's "Letter of an Old Bolshevik," which drew largely on conversations that Menshevik scholar had in Paris with Nikolai I. Bukharin...

...Nevertheless, it is impossible for even those suspicious of "Kremlinology" to overlook the dramatic events at the 17th Communist Party Congress in January 1934...

...He reported that, yes, his ancestor had tried to shoot himself, but the bullet had barely grazed the flesh around his shoulder...

...now let them kill Stalin...

...The basic storyline of the murder has not changed much...

...He could not turn the rank down, but he was reluctant to leave Leningrad and move to Moscow, and never did so...

...Whether in the Soviet Union, Franco's Spain, Castro's Cuba, or other dictatorial states, the domestic public has usually been acutely aware of who among the leaders are the mere bureaucrats, who are the ritual hardliners, and who are the really bloody fanatics...

...what sort of man he was (a gifted orator and fair writer who loved hunting, women and alcohol...

...The sandy soil of the area left little margin for error...

...That was not the only popular reaction...

...The majority of them probably thought of Kirov as a counterweight for the time being and then, perhaps, as Stalin's ultimate successor if this could all be managed in orderly fashion...

...The book's focus is on the third floor of the Smolny Institute in Leningrad, where Kirov was fatally shot, rather than on the Party and the world as they may have appeared to Stalin...

...On the other hand, relative moderates like Kirov (and Bukharin before him) may have been lulled into a lack of vigilance by their very popularity in Party circles and the relative respect they enjoyed among the public at large...

...when and how his independent views diverged from Lenin and Stalin's fanatical prescriptions...

...they waited for leadership to give a cue, which never arrived...

...Lominadze was taken back to his home and was recovering easily when a couple of days later GPU men arrived and took him to the hospital for a surgical procedure ordered by the Party (read: Stalin) from which he never emerged alive...

...She does not quite situate this development in the broader context of what one might call Stalin's political midlife crisis (1932-34), marked by the (apparent) suicide of his wife, the so-called Ryutin affair, and the catastrophe of Comintern policy in the Weimar Republic...

...Without undue overstatement...

...Like political leaders elsewhere who have been panicked by grim intelligence reports, Stalin's desperation in confronting the challenge posed by Kirov (and such allies as Kuibyshev, Yagoda and Ordzhonikidze) may have been stimulated and/or exacerbated by the popular anger revealed in the informers' reports...

...One of Knight's strengths is her emphasis on the deep political discontent among urban workers, peasants and others, reported by the GPU...

...on Hitler's "blood purge" of SA leader Ernst Roehm, former Chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher and others in mid-1934...

...It was at this point as well that Stalin lost the title of Party "General Secretary" and reverted for the rest of his life to being simply a "secretary...

...It served Stalin as a pretext for a continuous series of arrests and repressions, climaxing in the mass terror of 1937-38...

...By now, however, the Kirov murder is much less a mystery than whether, for example, it was really Fanny Kaplan who shot Lenin in 1918, or Stalin who had Maxim Gorky poisoned—let alone why he suddenly turned against the leaders of the Red Army in 1937...

...I encountered more that was new to me in the sympathetic account of Kirov presented in the first half of the work: what he did in Siberia, the Caucasus and Leningrad...

...Moreover, Kirov's speech (which was never published) discussed Lenin's "testament," a subject that had been strictly taboo for two years...

...A speech Kirov delivered in Leningrad during the celebrations of Stalin's 50th birthday in 1929, for instance, noted that Tbilisi, where Stalin got started, "was not much of a workers' center" at the time and that "his brochures were written in Georgian and later translated into Russian...

...That's the way to deal with political opposition," Stalin told intimates —and followed Hitler's example...

...In recounting the events of 1932-34 leading to Kirov's murder, Knight might have been more attentive to Stalin's reactions to events in Nazi Germany, notably his enthusiastic comments ("molodyets...

...Nor does she frontally address the hypothesis that, for two or three years, after the huge losses incurred in collectivization and breakneck industrialization, Stalin was restrained in various respects by a moderate Politburo majority whose most prominent figures were Kirov, economic planner Valerian Kuibyshev and secret police chief Genrykh G. Yagoda...

...Early on, many Russians and some experts abroad suspected that the murder had been arranged by Stalin...

...The popular but erratic Sergo Ordzhonikidze wandered back and forth between these colleagues and his Georgian countryman Stalin...

...police informers quoted disgruntled workers as saying, in the semi-passive Russian style, "They've killed Kirov...

...We also learn from the author that the Leningrad region Kirov ruled was one of the slowest in the country to collectivize agriculture, largely because he thought the brutal methods used elsewhere would be counterproductive...

...Then, in August 1988,1 happened to be accompanying a U.S...

...Not only did a strongly anti-Fascist speech by Kirov unleash a huge ovation, but dozens of delegates went on to strike out Stalin's name in voting on the list for Central Committee membership...

...Reviewed by Anatole Shub Author, "The New Russian Tragedy," "An Empire Loses Hope" It may or may not be The Kremlin's Greatest Mystery, as the subtitle of Amy Knight's workmanlike study proclaims, but certainly the murder of Leningrad Communist Party chief Sergei M. Kirov on December l, 1934, by Leonid V. Nikolayev, a disturbed young man, was one of the most dramatic events in Soviet history...

...The truth was suppressed for decades...

...Knight puts forward the case that by 1934 Kirov had emerged—in the minds of many Bolsheviks, but not necessarily in his own mind—as a moderate alternative to Stalin...

...exhibit in Magnitogorsk when the local paper printed an interview with Lominadze's grandson, who rejected the official story...

...It was all too reminiscent of the 1925 death in surgery of Marshal Mikhail V Frunze— a death that removed from the scene as formidable a rival to Stalin as Kirov ever became...

...The official documents include a supposed suicide note that always struck me as too pat, too much in the coming idiot-style of the Moscow Trial confessions...

...But that is another Kremlin mystery that deserves a book of its own...

...As Mao Zedong would do with his "Cultural Revolution" two decades afterward, Stalin turned popular discontent and generational impatience against his own Party cadres—with murderous effect...

...In reviewing the 17th Congress and its aftermath, one cannot claim that a majority of Bolshevik leaders wanted Kirov to replace Stalin at once...

...Not every bit of the evidence the author has culled from Soviet archives is necessarily the last word on the subject...

...The Congress insisted on electing Kirov as a secretary, too...

...The fashionable thesis, with scant corroboration behind it, is that he was misled by Gestapo disinformation fed through Czechoslovakia's President Eduard Benes...

...It was perhaps a mark of the degeneration of the Soviet regime that Stalin himself was finally done in by his own loathsome creature, Lavrenti P. Beria...

...Delegates rarely thought these matters through...

...Despite many later investigations and new archive materials made available to Knight and other recent scholars, even today the case against Stalin—a very strong one in terms of the preponderance of the evidence—cannot be proved beyondreasonable doubt...

...In discussing the death of the Georgian revolutionary Beso Lominadze (the "left" of the so-called "left-right bloc of [Sergei] Syrtsov and Lominadze"), who directed the giant Magnitogorsk steel plant, Knight accepts the official version that he shot himself while in his limousine...

...Anyone who has served on a hung jury knows how hard that is to do...