How the Soviet System Worked

OPENING SCENE

The Smolny Institute in Leningrad on December 1, 1934 is a place of controlled routine. The building — once a school for noble girls, then the headquarters of the October Revolution, now the Leningrad party headquarters — operates under ordinary bureaucratic security. Kirov arrives for work at three-thirty in the afternoon. His bodyguard has been stopped at the door, a deviation from normal procedure that will never be fully explained.

In the third-floor corridor, a young party member named Leonid Nikolayev is waiting. He fires once, at close range. Kirov falls. He is dead within minutes. The identity of the man behind the assassination — whether it was a jealous husband acting alone, a disgruntled party functionary, or a conspiracy reaching to the Kremlin — remains one of the most debated questions in Soviet history. What is not debated is how Joseph Stalin used the murder.

Stalin travels to Leningrad personally to oversee the investigation. He interrogates Kirov's bodyguard himself; the bodyguard dies in a suspicious automobile accident the following day. Within weeks, Stalin announces that the Leningrad killing is part of a vast terrorist conspiracy, orchestrated by former oppositionists. The machinery he sets in motion to "uncover" that conspiracy will not stop for four years. When it does stop, the old revolutionary generation is largely gone.