by Amy Knight
For the purpose of my narrative, I should clarify what I mean by political murder. Franklin Ford defines the term as “homicide related to the body politic and its governance,” including “everything from the most narrowly targeted assassination to random killings designed to intimidate opponents, while calling attention to a given cause.”5 This seems appropriate for the term as I use it here, although I would point out that in the cases of the 1999 attacks in Russia and the Boston Marathon bombings, where victims were killed or injured en masse, the term “political murder,” as opposed to “assassination,” is synonymous with state-sponsored terrorism.
Trotsky eliminated.
(Photograph courtesy of Eduardo Barraza)
1
COVERT VIOLENCE AS A KREMLIN TRADITION
Maybe all this is just what follows when you keep putting it about that cruelty is a virtue. To be rewarded like any other virtue—with preferment and power.… The appetite for death is truly Aztec. Saturnian.
—Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest
Political murder is far from a recent phenomenon in Russia. The brutal killings we have seen under Putin’s watch are not at all unique in Russia’s long history. This is not to say that Russians are more bloodthirsty than other members of our international community, just that its rulers have for centuries often settled scores with political opponents through violence. In her seminal book The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand Years of Political Murder, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse observed: “Eleven centuries of a history notable for its murders make Russia unlike any other country.”1 Carrère d’Encausse goes back to the origins of the Russian state in ninth-century Kievan Rus to demonstrate the relationship between politics and murder that formed a continuous pattern up through the Soviet period. She argues convincingly that unique historical circumstances, especially the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion, resulted in political violence on a scale that made Russia very different from countries in the West.
Blood-Letting Under the Tsars
Russia’s historical destiny was determined to a large extent by the vastness of its territory and the difficulty its leaders faced in defending their country’s frontiers. The two and a half centuries of Mongol occupation meant that Russia lagged far behind the West in its political and social development. The systematic use of murder became an essential means through which the tsars maintained their power. One need only think of the terror and violence that Ivan IV, known as Ivan the Terrible, imposed on his subjects in the sixteenth century. And, although Peter the Great is famous for his policies of modernizing and Westernizing Russia, his reign was also stained with blood. In 1718, Peter’s only son and heir, Aleksei, died under mysterious circumstances while in prison in the Peter and Paul Fortress on charges of treason. Aleksei, who had temporarily fled Russia to escape his father’s tyranny, had reportedly consorted with Peter’s enemies both within and outside Russia. As historian James Cracraft observed: “Peter had proved to be the implacable monarch rather than a merciful father, determined to brook no threat to his plans nor opposition to his rule, even if it came from his own son. Opponents of his regime, whether at home or abroad, were given clear warning.”2 Political opposition was a continuous feature of Peter’s regime, and the tsar used torture and execution to quell revolts. In short, Peter’s reputation for severity was well earned.
It is noteworthy that the two long reigns that followed Peter the Great—that of Catherine the Great and Alexander I—were the result of regicide. Peter III, husband of Catherine, had only been tsar for six months before he was murdered in July 1762 and his widow became the empress. The official story was that he died of a “hemorrhoidal colic aggravated by a stroke,” but rumors abounded that Peter III was the victim of a murder orchestrated by his wife. Even Voltaire, who became Catherine’s ardent admirer, acknowledged this: “I know that she has been accused of some little misdemeanors a propos of her husband, but these are family matters that are none of my concern. Besides, it is no bad thing if one has a fault to amend. It causes one to make great efforts to win the public’s esteem.”3
After a long and successful reign, Catherine died in 1796 and her son Paul became tsar. But his rule was short-lived. Paul was brutally murdered in his palace bedchamber by a group of noblemen who objected to the tsar’s inconsistent and erratic policies, particularly those relating to international issues. Paul’s son Alexander I would face suspicion about his involvement in the murder throughout his reign, with good cause, given that he knew of plans to force his father to abdicate and that violence would be used because Paul would not accede to the demands of his opponents.
It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, with the advent of Alexander II to the throne, that Russia cast off absolutism and the sovereign no longer exercised the power of life and death over his people. Alexander II emancipated the serfs in 1861 and introduced other significant political reforms in 1864 that changed the relationship between ruler and ruled. The political violence during the period of Alexander II and after would come “from below.” In 1881, Alexander II was assassinated by members of a terrorist group, the Socialist Revolutionaries. Thirty years later, Pyotr Stolypin, prime minister under Tsar Nicholas II and a forceful advocate of agricultural reform, was shot to death at the Kiev Opera House by a revolutionary anarchist.
In the meantime, a peasant and mystic faith healer named Grigorii Rasputin had ensconced himself in the court and developed a close relationship with the tsar and tsarina. Rasputin was accused in court circles of using his position to influence political decisions and was thought to have actually been planning a conspiracy to get the increasingly weak and ineffective tsar to abdicate in favor of his wife. This set into motion the dramatic murder of Rasputin, who was poisoned and then shot by a group of noblemen in late 1916, the last political murder during the Russian monarchy.
The Bolsheviks Take Over
As it turned out, this brief period where ordinary people could have a say in government, however modest, would not continue. The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 resulted in a return to a system in which leaders, first Lenin and then Stalin, subjugated their people brutally. In Carrère d’Encausse’s words: “The Soviet leaders gave this violence a dimension that no one could have foreseen, even in science fiction.”4
Lenin created the notorious Cheka, the secret police, who killed thousands of those who opposed the Bolsheviks, after murdering Tsar Nicholas II and his family. But Stalin, as we know, far surpassed Lenin in ruthlessness toward his countrymen. When we contemplate Stalin’s rule, we think of the highly publicized show trials in the late 1930s, executions for “political crimes” in the basement of Lubyanka, the NKVD prison, and mass arrests. Yet Stalin also engaged in covert violence against his perceived enemies—killings by hired assassins, staged automobile accidents, and poisonings. Such murders were useful, not only to get rid of opponents, but also to instill a sense of fear and dread in the ruling elite, who Stalin always felt threatened by.
Sergei Kirov
The first high-profile political murder under Stalin was that of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov on December 1, 1934, which historian Robert Conquest called “the murder of the century,” because Stalin used Kirov’s death as a pretext for launching his Great Terror, the infamous purges that decimated the country’s elite. Kirov was shot to death by a lone assassin as he walked down the hall to his office in Leningrad’s Smolny Institute. The killer, Leonid Nikolaev, was subsequently executed for the crime.
The Kirov murder has been a subject of controversy among historians ever since Khrushchev, in his speech to the Twenty-second Communist Party Congress in 1961, raised the possibility that Stalin had ordered the crime. He suggested that, after the murder, Kirov’s personal bodyguard, Mikhail Borisov, had been “liquidated” while on his way to be interrogated by Stalin as part of a cover-up. (The official story was that Borisov’s car had been involved in an accident.) Khrushchev noted that there was “much to be revealed” about the case. In
fact, a series of party commissions was created by post-Stalin leaders, including Gorbachev, to look into the Kirov assassination, but they were all inconclusive.
In my book on the Kirov murder, I argue that there is a convincing case against Stalin for several reasons.5 First, Stalin had clear motives to get rid of Kirov, who was a highly popular leader both in Leningrad and among party stalwarts. At the Seventeenth Communist Party Congress in early 1934, Kirov received a standing ovation for a rousing speech he made, while the applause after Stalin spoke was much less enthusiastic. There was reportedly talk behind the scenes at the congress that it was time for Stalin to step down, and Kirov’s name came up as a possible successor.
In the ensuing months, as Russian archives have revealed, there was increasing tension between Stalin and Kirov, who was apparently having doubts about Stalin’s harsh domestic policies. And then of course there is the fact that Stalin seized on the murder to initiate his purges, declaring, without an investigation, that the crime was part of a terrorist conspiracy, and arresting two prominent Bolsheviks, Grigorii Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, for supposedly plotting the murder.
As for the assassin, Nikolaev, he allegedly had personal motives for wanting Kirov dead, and was mentally imbalanced. But it was never explained how he gained access to the heavily guarded Smolny Institute that day, or why Kirov’s bodyguard had not been by Kirov’s side at the time of the shooting. Suspicions that the NKVD had orchestrated the murder surfaced right away, and NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda was subsequently accused of ordering the murder, and executed. But it is inconceivable that he would have acted without approval from Stalin, who by 1934 had absolute control over his secret police.
The last party commission to investigate the Kirov murder was established in 1989 under Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev. The commission, which included officials from the office of the Procurator (prosecutor), the KGB, and various archival administrations, concluded after two years that “no materials objectively support Stalin’s participation or NKVD participation in the organization and carrying out of Kirov’s murder.” But Yakovlev dissented. Writing in Pravda in December 1990, Yakovlev pointed out that there were many questions left unanswered by the commission’s report, including the disappearance of correspondence between Kirov and Stalin before Kirov’s death and the unexplained admittance of the killer, Nikolaev, to the Smolny Institute without a special pass. Clearly, members of the commission wanted to whitewash Stalin because the idea that he had ordered the murder would bring into question the entire Soviet past. No one in the party elite was ready for that, even so late in the history of the Soviet state, a short time before its dissolution.
Several observers have pointed out the parallels between the murder of Kirov and that of Boris Nemtsov. As Russia expert Karen Dawisha observed: “In the death of Nemtsov, irrespective of who is ultimately found responsible, we once again have the assassination of a person who could have become the leader of the country.”6 And Russian historian Mikhail Iampolskii raised concerns about how Nemtsov’s death might be used by the Kremlin to crackdown on critics: “One cannot exclude the possibility that the execution of Nemtsov could become for Russia something like the murder of Kirov.”7 While of course the current Putin regime is very different from that of Stalin, one can indeed see eerie echoes of the past in the Nemtsov case, in particular the fact that Putin, like Stalin with Kirov, took direct control of the murder investigation.
Maxim Gorky
There has long been speculation about the death of Maxim Gorky in June 1936. One of Russia’s best-known fiction writers, Gorky had initially supported the Bolsheviks in their revolution against the Tsar. But then he became critical of Lenin for his ruthless suppression of opposition. During most of the 1920s Gorky lived in Italy, only returning to stay permanently in Russia in 1932, following a personal invitation from Stalin. Gorky henceforth became an apologist for the Soviet regime, publishing in Russian journals and newspapers article after article filled with sycophantic praise for Stalin and his politics. He played a crucial role in the Kremlin’s extensive propaganda machine and, in exchange, was given a mansion in Moscow and a large dacha in the suburbs.
After Kirov’s murder, Gorky’s relationship with Stalin became increasingly strained. To be sure, Gorky followed the party line on the murder, writing a dutiful article for Pravda the day after the killing: “A wonderful person has been killed, one of the best leaders of the Party.… The success of the enemy speaks not only to its abomination, but also to the inadequacy of our vigilance.”8 But the subsequent arrests of Zinoviev and Kamenev were troubling to Gorky, because it took Stalin’s campaign against “counterrevolutionaries” to a new level. Both men wrote letters appealing to Gorky from prison in the hope that he would intercede with Stalin on their behalf. Gorky never received their letters, but he did pay a visit to Stalin in March 1935, apparently to discuss Kamenev, to whom Gorky was personally close. By this time Gorky himself was being publicly attacked in the press, accused of publishing counterrevolutionary literature (Dostoyevsky) and supporting the “class enemy.” In response, Gorky bent over backwards to demonstrate his revolutionary zeal to Stalin in his writings.
But Stalin did not trust Gorky, particularly since Gorky and the prominent Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin had been touting the idea of a second party, a “union of intellectuals” to participate in politics as a sort of adjunct to the ruling Communist Party. Also, by 1936 Stalin was about to have Zinoviev and Kamenev executed and he could not be sure of what Gorky’s reaction would be. In the words of the writer Aleksei Tolstoy, who was a part of Gorky’s inner circle: “There was no way to force him to remain silent. To arrest or exile, not to mention shoot him, would have been even less likely. The idea of hastening the liquidation of the sickly Gorky ‘without bloodshed’ through [NKVD chief] Yagoda had to have been viewed by the host in the Kremlin as the only way out.”9
Indeed, this is the scenario that Russian historian Arkady Vaksberg, who draws upon archival sources released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, endorses. Gorky reportedly came down with pneumonia after he returned to Moscow from a stay in Crimea in late May 1936, and died on June 18, surrounded by Kremlin doctors who had been trying to save him for days. Vaksberg suggests that Gorky could have recovered had his food not been poisoned by a substance manufactured at a special NKVD laboratory in Moscow.
The Bolsheviks had started to develop poison for the elimination of political enemies at a Moscow toxicological laboratory as far back as 1921 or 1922. In the early 1930s, the laboratory was placed under the supervision of Yagoda and his secret police. Biochemists experimented with poisons on Soviet prisoners in order to devise a substance that could not be detected, even after the victim died.10 During one of the Moscow purge trials two years after Gorky’s death, it was alleged that Yagoda had ordered his killing. Yagoda had been close to both Gorky and his widowed daughter-in-law and almost a daily presence at Gorky’s Moscow home, of course reporting back to Stalin. So he was well positioned to orchestrate the poisoning on Stalin’s behalf. (As was so often the case, accusations at the infamous purge trials that followed inevitably reflected partial truths.)
As Vaksberg notes, the Kremlin’s treatment of Gorky’s legacy was a significant sign that he had suffered Stalin’s displeasure. Immediately after his death, the Kremlin let it be known that Gorky’s memory was not sacrosanct. The three literary journals that had been published under his auspices were shut down and their editorial employees arrested. There were also vendettas against many of the writers who Gorky had supported.
Further Violent Reprisals
Poisoning was part of the initial plan to kill Stalin’s archenemy Leon Trotsky, though in the end he was stabbed to death with an ice pick in 1940 at his home in Mexico by a hired assassin named Ramon Mercader. This was an early example of Stalin using his secret police to pursue opponents outside his country’s borders. Trotsky, a leading Bolshevik and founder of the Red Army, had been removed from power in 1927
after forming the so-called Left Opposition against Stalin. He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 and ended up in Mexico City, where he continued to write and speak out, as an orthodox Marxist, against Stalinism. Although it was generally assumed that Stalin had ordered the Trotsky murder—Mercader was given a “hero of the Soviet Union” title upon his return to the Soviet Union in 1960 after twenty years in a Mexican jail—it was not until the mid-1990s that this was confirmed by a former NKVD official, Pavel Sudoplatov.11
After World War II ended, Stalin let up on his purges, but the knowledge that he could order political murders at will kept his fellow politburo members in constant terror. They knew full well that he resorted to covert methods when he wanted someone eliminated without a fuss. Even Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, was aware of this. She recalled in her memoirs Only One Year overhearing a conversation in 1948 in which her father ordered the murder of the prominent Jewish theater director Solomon Mikhoels by staging a traffic accident.12 (Stalin, who had become a fierce anti-Semite, was later to launch an extensive purge of Jews, starting with doctors accused of medical murder, that only ended because of his death in March 1953.)
Mikhoels was not a political threat to Stalin, but his prominence as a theater figure and his travels abroad, including to the United States, left him vulnerable to Stalin’s paranoia about “cosmopolitanism,” the dreaded accusation that came to be applied to Jews in the period before Stalin died. In his 2016 novel The Yid, Paul Goldberg brilliantly portrays the dark and sinister atmosphere of this time: “At night Moscow is the czardom of black cats and Black Marias [the transport vehicles of the secret police]. The former dart between snow banks in search of mice and companionship. The latter emerge from the improbably tall, castle-like gates of Lubyanka, to return laden with enemies of the people.”13
Goldberg’s imagined story is about a plot to kill Stalin carried out by a small group of Jews, “Yids,” who are earmarked for arrest, together with a black American living in the Soviet Union. The group, which includes a former theater actor associated with the director Mikhoels and a Jewish doctor, is able to kill Stalin at his dacha, Kuntsevo, and get away with murdering several police operatives and thugs who stand in their way, because of the lawlessness and fear that permeated the entire system. No one, including those who witnessed crimes, was safe from reprisals by the secret police. So everyone kept quiet, except for covert denunciations of their neighbors and work comrades. And the fact that political murders were covered up by a morass of misinformation makes the author’s fictional premise—that Stalin actually died from a lethal injection, not a stroke, as the official version went—seem entirely plausible.