Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Pauker arrived in the anteroom to announce the crash. Such ham-handed “car crashes” were soon to become an occupational hazard for eminent Bolsheviks. Certainly anyone who wanted to cover up a plot might have wished Borisov dead. When Stalin was informed of this reekingly suspicious death, he denounced the local Cheka: “They couldn’t even do that properly.”⁴

The mystery will never now be conclusively solved. Did Stalin order Kirov’s assassination? There is no evidence that he did, yet the whiff of his complicity still hangs in the air. Khrushchev, who arrived in Leningrad on a separate train as a Moscow delegate, claimed years later that Stalin ordered the murder. Mikoyan, a more trustworthy witness in many ways than Khrushchev and with less to prove, came to believe that Stalin was somehow involved in the death.

Stalin certainly no longer trusted Kirov whose murder served as a pretext to destroy the Old Bolshevik cliques. His drafting of the 1st December Law minutes after the death seems to stink as much as his decision to blame the murder on Zinoviev. Stalin had indeed tried to replace Kirov’s friend Medved and he knew the suspicious Zaporozhets who, shortly before the murder, had gone on leave without Moscow’s permission, perhaps to absent himself from the scene. Nikolaev was a pathetic bundle of suspicious circumstances. Then there were the strange events of the day of the murder: why was Borisov delayed at the door and why were there already Moscow NKVD officers in the Smolny so soon after the assassination? Borisov’s death is highly suspect. And Stalin, often so cautious, was also capable of such a reckless gamble, particularly after admiring Hitler’s reaction to the Reichstag fire and his purge.

Yet much of this appears less sinister on closer analysis. The lax security around Kirov proves nothing, since even Stalin often only had one or two guards. The gun is less suspicious when one realizes that all Party members carried them. Stalin’s deteriorating relationship with Kirov was typical of the friction within his entourage. Stalin’s swift reaction to the murder, and his surreal investigation, did not mean that he arranged it. When, on 27 June 1927, Voikov, Soviet Ambassador to Poland, was assassinated, Stalin had reacted with the same speed and uninterest in the real culprits. In that case, he told Molotov that he “sensed the hand of Britain” and immediately ordered the shooting of scores of so-called “monarchists.” The Bolsheviks always regarded justice as a political tool. The local NKVD, desperate to conceal their incompetence, may well have arranged Borisov’s murder. So much can be explained by the habitual clumsiness of totalitarian panic.

However, it is surely naive to expect written evidence of the crime of the century. We know that in other murders, Stalin gave verbal orders in the name of the Instantsiya, an almost magical euphemism for the Highest Authority, with which we will become very familiar. [74] The direct involvement of Yagoda seems unlikely because he was not particularly close to Stalin but there were many Chekists, from Agranov to Zaporozhets, who were both personally trusted and amoral enough to do anything the Party asked of them. It is unlikely to have been a Henrician “Rid me of this turbulent priest”: Stalin had to micromanage everything. So he may have read Nikolaev’s letter to him and exploited his loser’s resentment against Kirov.⁵

Stalin’s friendship with Kirov was one-sided and flimsy but there is no doubt that “Stalin simply loved him,” according to “Iron Lazar,” who added that “he treated everyone politically.” His friendships, like teenage infatuations, meandered between love, admiration and venomous jealousy. He was an extreme example of Gore Vidal’s epigram that “Every time a friend succeeds, a little bit of me dies.” He had adored Bukharin whose widow explains that Stalin could love and hate the same person “because love and hate born of envy… fought with each other in the same breast.” Perhaps Kirov’s betrayal of his sincere friendship provoked a rage like a woman scorned, followed by terrible guilt after the murder. But even with his “friends,” Stalin cultivated his privacy and detachment: he wanted to be supremely elusive.⁶

Stalin was always a more loyal friend to those he knew much less well. When a schoolboy of sixteen wrote to him, Stalin sent him a present of ten roubles and the boy wrote a thank-you letter. He was always indulging in bursts of sentimentality for the friends of his youth: “I’m sending you 2000 roubles,” he wrote in December 1933 to Peter Kapanadze, his friend from the Seminary who became a priest, then a teacher. “I haven’t got more now… Your needs are a special occasion for me so I send my [book] royalties to you. You’ll [also] be given 3000 roubles as a loan… Live long and be happy” and he signed the letter with his father’s name, “Beso.”

One strange unpublished letter illustrates this distant warmth: during 1930, Stalin received a request from the head of a collective farm in distant Siberia as to whether to admit a Tsarist policeman who claimed to have known Stalin. This old gendarme had actually been Stalin’s guard in exile. But Stalin wrote a long, handwritten recommendation: “During my exile in Kureika 1914–16, Mikhail Merzlikov was my guard/police constable. At that time he had one order—to guard me… It’s clear that I could not be in ‘friendly’ relations with Merzlikov. Yet I must testify that while not being friendly, our relations were not as hostile as they usually were between exile and guard. It must be explained why, it seems to me, Merzlikov carried out his duties without the usual police zeal, did not spy on me or persecute me, overlooked my often going away and often scolded police officers for barring his ‘orders’… It’s my duty to testify to all this. It was so in 1914–16 when Merzlikov was my guard, differing from other policemen for the better. I don’t know what he did under Kolchak and Soviet power, I don’t know how he is now.”

There, in a man who killed his best friends, was true friendship. Whether or not he killed Kirov, Stalin certainly exploited the murder to destroy not only his opponents but the less radical among his own allies. ⁷

* * *

Kirov lay in state in an open casket, wearing a dark tunic and surrounded by the red banners, inscribed wreaths and tropical palms of the Bolshevik funeral amid the Potemkinian neoclassical grandeur of the Taurida Palace.[75] At 9:30 p.m. on 3 December, Stalin and the Politburo formed the honour guard, another part of Bolshevik necro-ritual. Voroshilov and Zhdanov appeared upset but Molotov was stony. “Astonishingly calm and impenetrable was the face of JV Stalin,” noted Khrushchev, “giving the impression that he was lost in thought, his eyes glazing over Kirov’s bullet-struck corpse.” Before departing, Stalin appointed Zhdanov as Leningrad boss while remaining a CC Secretary. Yezhov also stayed behind to oversee the investigation.

At ten, Stalin and the others bore Kirov’s coffin to a gun carriage. The body travelled slowly through the streets to the station where it was loaded onto the train that was to take Stalin back to Moscow. Draped in garlands, this death train shunted into the darkness after midnight, leaving behind Kirov’s brain which was to be studied for signs of revolutionary brilliance in the Leningrad Institute.[76]

Even before the train arrived in Moscow, Agranov, the Chekist running the investigation, interrogated the assassin: “Stubborn as a mule,” he reported to Stalin.

“Nourish Nikolaev well, buy him a chicken,” replied Stalin, who so enjoyed chicken himself. “Nourish him so he will be strong, then he’ll tell us who was leading him. And if he doesn’t talk, we’ll give it to him and he’ll tell… everything.”⁸

At Moscow’s October Station, the casket was again transferred to a gun carriage and deposited in the Hall of Columns for the funeral next day. Soon afterwards, Stalin briefed the Politburo on his unconvincing investigation. Mikoyan, who had loved Kirov, was so upset that he asked how Nikolaev had twice escaped arrest with a pistol and how Borisov had been killed.

“How could it happen?” Stalin agreed indignantly.

“Someone should answer for this, shouldn’t they?” exclaimed Mikoyan, focusing on the strange behaviour of the NKVD. “Isn’t the OGPU Chairman [Yagoda] responsible for Politburo security? He should be called to account.” But Stalin protected Yagoda, concentrating on his real targets, the Old Bolsheviks like Zinoviev. Afterwards, Sergo, Kuibyshev and Mikoyan were deeply suspicious: Mikoyan discussed Stalin’s “unclear behaviour” with Sergo, probably on their walks around the Kremlin, the traditional place for such forbidden chats. Both were “surprised and amazed and could not understand it.” Sergo lost his voice with grief. Kuibyshev is said to have proposed a CC investigation to check the one being carried out by the NKVD. It is surely doubtful that Mikoyan, who still fervently admired Stalin and served him loyally until his death, believed at that time that his Leader was responsible. These Bolsheviks were accustomed to self-delude and double-think their way out of such nagging doubts.⁹

That night, Pavel Alliluyev replayed his role after Nadya’s death by staying with Stalin at Kuntsevo. Leaning on his hand, Stalin murmured that after Kirov’s death, “I am absolutely an orphan.” He said it so touchingly that Pavel hugged him. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of his anguish that someone had done this to Kirov—or that they had needed to do it.

At 10 a.m. on the 5th, with Gorky Street closed and tight security under the command of Pauker (as at