On 1 December 1934, former member of the Soviet Communist Party Leonid Nikolaev entered the party’s headquarters, the Smolny Building, in the city of Leningrad. After making his way to the third floor, he gunned down Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov outside his office. Kirov was killed instantly, murdered in the middle of the afternoon. Nikolaev was immediately arrested, and confusion quickly abounded in the Soviet press as the Soviet political police, the NKVD, launched a search for other suspected accomplices.
Before the shooting, Nikolaev had become increasingly resentful of the party and blamed it for his unemployment and worsening personal circumstances. He had grown steadily convinced, moreover, that his wife was having an affair with Kirov. Nikolaev’s motives aside, the impact of the shooting in the following months and years proved sensational and was the chief starting point of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror. Before this dramatic day, Nikolaev was by no means a significant person in Leningrad. But his actions on 1 December had far-reaching consequences for hundreds of thousands of Soviet people living under the Stalin regime in the late 1930s.
Years later during the Cold War, historians typically blamed Stalin for arranging Kirov’s murder and presented it as one of the crimes of the century. Stalin, it was said, had masterminded the killing with Nikolaev as his tool. Stalin had then used the murder to smear his former political opponents and anyone who stood in his way of achieving untrammelled power. If Stalin wanted someone arrested, they could be accused of participation in the conspiracy to kill Kirov, and evidence fabricated in support. On the day of Kirov’s murder, Stalin rushed through a new emergency order – the law of 1 December 1934 – that formed the legal basis for much of the later Great Terror. The law sanctioned convictions and executions without a proper trial; those arrested had no access to proper representation.
