The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia

by Tim Tzouliadis

On December 1, 1934, in an empty corridor of a Leningrad office building, a waiting assassin stepped out and shot the party boss Sergei Kirov at point-blank range. Although Kirov had been Stalin’s personal friend, subsequent evidence pointed toward the premeditated assassination of a political rival. The day after the assassination, Stalin boarded a train to Leningrad, and “retaliatory” violence quickly followed in his wake. Kirov’s principal bodyguard was summoned to appear before Stalin, but arrived dead at an NKVD hospital, having been thrown from a moving truck. Stalin himself, meanwhile, interrogated the assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, asking why he had killed Kirov. According to one witness, “Nikolaev answered that he killed Comrade Kirov on the instruction of a person employed by the Cheka, and at this pointed to the men from the Cheka sitting in the room . . . ‘They forced me to do it.’ The NKVD agent then knocked Nikolaev to the floor with a blow to the head, and he was removed.” 2 The assassin Nikolaev was tried and executed, and the NKVD officers in Leningrad were arrested and sent to the camps, where they would later be shot. In a subsequent show trial, the NKVD chief, Henrikh Yagoda, was charged with organizing Kirov’s murder as part of a “Trotskyite conspiracy.”3 But in truth, the Kirov assassination was only ever a pretext for what was to come.