Lessons from Russia
On December 1, 1934, Leonid Nikolayev shot and killed Sergey Kirov, an Old Bolshevik and a loyal and vocal supporter of Joseph Stalin and his controversial policies of rapid industrialization and collectivization. The assassin was a young unemployed man brought up as a Bolshevik who had been expelled from the party, and was described as a lone misfit. Kirov, on the other hand, was a high-ranking Bolshevik, the Leningrad Party leader and charismatic ally of Stalin. His assassination was described as the ‘Murder of the Century’ and his body lay in state in the Kremlin. Stalin made a great show of kissing the cheek of the corpse. Kirov was buried in the Kremlin wall after a state funeral with the highest members of government, including Stalin, acting as pallbearers. Nikolayev was tried secretly and executed on December 29.
Kirov’s death served as the pretext for what has become known as the ‘Great Terror.’ It became the justification for the elimination of all opposition to Stalin’s rule as totalitarian dictator of the Soviet Union. Every vestige of political opposition was removed either by execution or sentence to labor camps. Fear of Stalin and the state pervaded the citizenry; people were afraid to discuss the purge or show any opposition to Stalin’s leadership. Informants, setting citizen against citizen, were the tool of the Great Terror, sowing distrust throughout Soviet society. The purge lasted until 1938 and culminated in the elimination of three-quarters of the top military leaders on the eve of World War II. Its effects, of course, permeated Soviet society. Fear of retribution by the state is still apparent today in Putin’s regime in the Russian Federation.