In Leningrad on 1 December 1934, Kirov, the secretary of the Leningrad Soviet, was shot and killed in his office. It is possible Stalin was implicated. What is certain is that the murder worked directly to his advantage. Kirov had been a highly popular figure in the Party and had been elected to the Politburo. He was known to be unhappy with the speed of Stalin's industrialization drive and also with the growing number of purges. If organized opposition to Stalin were to form within the Party, Kirov was the most likely individual around whom dissatisfied members might have rallied. That danger to Stalin had now been removed.
Stalin was quick to exploit the situation. Within two hours of learning of Kirov's murder he had signed a 'Decree Against Terrorist Acts'. On the pretext of hunting down the killers, a fresh purge of the Party was begun, led by Genrikh Yagoda, head of the NKVD. Three thousand suspected conspirators were rounded up and then imprisoned or executed and tens of thousands of other people were deported from Leningrad. Stalin then filled the vacant positions with his own nominees:
• In 1935, Kirov's key post as Party boss in Leningrad was filled by Andrei Zhdanov, a dedicated Stalinist.
• The equivalent post in Moscow was taken by Nikita Khrushchev, another ardent Stalin supporter.
• In recognition of his successful courtroom bullying of 'oppositionists' in the earlier purge trials, Andrei Vyshinsky was appointed State Prosecutor.
• Stalin's fellow Georgian, Lavrenti Beria, was entrusted with overseeing state security in the national minority areas of the USSR.
• Stalin's personal secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev, was put in charge of the Secretariat.
As a result of these placements, there remained no significant area of Soviet bureaucracy which Stalin did not control.
The outstanding feature of the post-Kirov purge was the status of many of its victims. Prominent among those arrested were Kamenev and Zinoviev. Their arrest sent out a clear message: no Party members, whatever their status, were safe. Arbitrary arrest and summary execution became the norm, as the fate of the representatives at the Party Congress of 1934 suggests:
• Of the 1,996 delegates who attended, 1,108 were executed during the next three years.
• In addition, out of the 139 Central Committee members elected at that gathering, all but 41 of them were executed during the purges.
Historian Leonard Shapiro, in a celebrated study of the CPSU, described these events as 'Stalin's victory over the Party'. From this point on, the Soviet Communist Party was entirely under his control. It ceased, in effect, to have a separate existence. Stalin had become the Party.
World History
