LEST WE FORGET

Party Boss' Slaying Set Off Purges (Vladimir Kovalev, St. Petersburg Times, December 3rd, 2004)

Seventy years ago on Wednesday, on Dec. 1, 1934, a shot rang out that killed not only the Communist Party boss of Leningrad, but also marked the start of a wave of mass repressions by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

Sergei Kirov, a Politburo member, was shot dead in a corridor in the former Smolny Institute girls' school about 4:30pm by Leonid Nikolayev, a former communist who not long before the assassination had been expelled from the party for "inappropriate behavior."

But it is now widely believed by historians that Stalin organized Kirov's slaying to get rid of a popular potential rival and as a pretext for a mass purge of the citizens of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then known, and the rest of the Soviet population.

Stalin hated the cultured city and the purges led by Kirov's successor, Andrei Zhdanov, centered on it. Tens of thousands of citizens were arrested and it has been estimated a quarter of the city was arrested, deported or killed over the next two years.

"The assassin detained at the scene of the crime appeared to be a member of the former opposition anti-revolutionary group that was organized by members of anti-Soviet [Grigory] Zinovyev's group in Leningrad," a Communist Party account of the incident written in 1945 says.

"The assassination of S. M. Kirov, the working class favorite, has provoked wide-scale anger and deep regret among the workers of our country."

Nikolayev and 13 others were charged with plotting the assassination. All were convicted, sentenced to death and shot shortly after the assassination.

All the alleged killers, except Nikolayev, were rehabilitated in 1956 as Nikita Khrushchev tried to correct the record of those falsely incriminated during Stalin's rule.

But the first 14 victims were just the beginning of what is today called the Great Terror that cost millions of Soviet citizens their lives in the years before World War II.

Historians estimate that from Jan. 1, 1935 until July 1, 1941 (Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941) more than 19.8 million people were arrested, including 7 million who were summarily convicted, often by troikas of three NKD secret police officers, and shot.

Although these facts (and the author’s estimates are very conservative) are now well-known, apologists on the left continue to offer perfunctory expressions of regret and to divert moral outrage to the cases of anti-marxist dictators whose records of oppression are picayune in comparison. This week, we saw a good example here as a commentator thundered accusations of “apostle of murder” at anyone who defended Pinochet of Chile. Pinochet, who is accused of being responsible for 8,000 deaths, is the man responsible for saving his country from going down the road taken by Russia, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cambodia and Cuba. Had it done so, the chance that Chileans would have suffered a similarly horrific fate is as close to a historical certainty as one can get. We assume all those enraged leftists determined to see him dishonoured and imprisoned regret that they didn’t.