The Great Terror
1 December 1934
The Kirov murder
A single assassination in Leningrad became the door to a terror that did not need another assassin.
Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party boss and a Politburo member, was shot in the Smolny by Leonid Nikolaev. Stalin used the murder at once. A decree the same week sped “terrorist” cases from arrest to execution with almost no appeal. Former oppositionists were accused of moral responsibility and then of organizing the crime.
Whether Stalin ordered the murder itself is still argued; the archives have not produced a clean confession from him, and serious historians disagree. What is not argued is the use he made of it. The Kirov case was the on-ramp to the Moscow trials and to the mass operations of 1937.
Where to check it · Matthew Lenoe, The Kirov Murder and Soviet History; Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror.