WI Kirov not killed (assuming Stalin *didn't* kill him in OTL)

Some "what if"'s are dependent on the interpretation of OTL events whose nature is disputable. For example, the question "What if Sergei Kirov wasn't killed in Leningrad on December 1, 1934?" obviously has a different significance if Kirov's assassin was a lone gunman (Leonid Nikolaev) than it would if Stalin were behind the assassination. And on the issue of whether Stalin was indeed responsible for the murder, there still seems to be no consensus. That he used the murder as the justification or pretext for a savage repression of real or supposed enemies does not in itself prove that he ordered the assassination. Two distinguished historians of the Soviet Union, Robert Conquest and Amy Knight, have written books claiming Stalin did it; equally distinguished historians like the late Adam Ulam have argued that he didn't. Robert Service in his biography of Stalin seems to be agnostic, writing that "all the evidence is circumstantial and no proof has ever been found. What is undeniable is that Stalin had no compunction about drastic measures. He had not yet killed a close associate but the assasination of Kirov could have been the first such occasion; and even if he did not order the killing, it was he who most benefited from it." http://books.google.com/books?id=hSWK6Dh4wRgC&pg=PA315 (Service also noted that there was little to sustain Kirov's reputation as a political moderate "beyond a few gestures of increasing bread supplies in Leningrad....All Politburo members tended to protect their sectors of work against the ravaging effects of general policy, and Kirov was no exception." http://books.google.com/books?id=hSWK6Dh4wRgC&pg=PA314) Evan Mawdsley in *The Stalin Years: The Soviet Union, 1929-1953* http://books.google.com/books?id=m-voAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA102 notes that "Attempts to prove a link between Stalin and the Kirov assassination have come to nothing, and there have certainly been times--under Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and in the post-Soviet era--when it would have been in the interests of the powers that be, who controlled the archives, to prove such an association."

When I posted on this subject some years ago in soc.history.what-if, I had just read Donald Rayfield's *Stalin and His Hangmen*, and as I noted,

"[Rayfield] doubts whether 'Stalin and Iagoda [would] have used such a loose cannon as Leonid Nikolaev when they had professional killers at their disposal' and concludes that 'the simplest explanation seems the best: that Leonid Nikolaev was a demented, aggrieved killer acting on his own, aided only by luck in encountering Kirov when he was unguarded.' (Rayfield doesn't even seem to find it too suspicious that Nikolaev had been released after being detained in October for carrying a gun and acting suspiciously in the party headquarters: 'the Smolny Institute was not a restricted building and Nikolaev had had a license for a sporting weapon since 1924.')" http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/0755db997dd27c93

AFAIK, the most recent work on the subject is by Matthew Lenoe, whose *The Kirov Murder and Soviet History* (Yale University Press 2010) concludes that Nikolaev acted alone. I haven't had a chance to read the book, but there is a review here: http://miskinhill.com.au/journals/asees/24:1-2/reviews/lenoe-kirov-murder Anyway, Lenoe makes his views clear in this interview with the Russian magazine *New Times*:

*****

"So Professor, did Stalin order Kirov's murder?

"No. I am 99 percent certain of this.

"Do you leave one percent in case any new documents from the secret
archives of the Kremlin or FSB suddenly come to light?

"I examined documents that were submitted to the Central Committee
Commission and the Committee of Party Control in April 1956, the documents
of the investigation in 1934, the testimony of people who were
interrogated during the Great Terror, and finally [those of] Genrikh
Lyushkov, a member of the NKVD central apparatus, and later NKVD
administrator of the Far East. In June 1938, he defected to Japan.
Lushkov was one of the principle investigators in Kirov's murder. He
arrived in Leningrad the morning after the murder on the same train as
Stalin and Genrikh Yagoda (then head of the NKVD), interrogated key
witnesses including the murderer Leonid Nikolaev. He played an important
role in the case against Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1935-36. Japanese
intelligence meticulously interrogated Lushkov, and he, unlike Alexander
Orlov, gave a very accurate account of the Great Terror. A year later, in
1939, a Japanese magazine published a translation of his 'Open Letter' to
Stalin, in which Lushkov wrote about Kirov's murder and its investigation
in great detail. His description is confirmed by archival documents which
were opened decades later. So Lushkov, who did not have any illusions
about Stalin, wrote that Nikolaev, a man with obvious mental problems,
committed the murder on his own initiative. But Stalin already used it as
an excuse to eliminate his enemies and opponents.

"But Robert Conquest doesn't have much faith in Lushkov's testimony
especially since he was under house arrest in Tokyo and apparently under
the control of Japanese intelligence. Another researcher Amy Knight also
believes that Kirov's murderer was precisely Stalin. However, Adam Ulam
(the famous Harvard historian and author of tens of books, including
Stalin: Man and his Era) upholds the version you present. Why are you so
inclined to believe the testimony of one of Stalin's 'wolves'?

"Because in a number of other issues--the number of repressed in the
NKVD's Far East Department and the preparation of the show trials--Lushkov
gives facts that are absolutely accurate and supported by archival
documents, which the KGB opened in 1956. I don't understand why he would
lie about Kirov especially since he wanted to get over to the United
States. Finally, his version is confirmed by an interview with another of
the case's investigators, Leonid Raikhman (he wrote a book under the
pseudonym Popov) which he gave in 1989 during perestroika to the St.
Petersburg historian Alla Kirilina. She has done a lot to uncover this
mystery.

"What then of Khrushchev of findings?

"He failed to obtain enough evidence, though he very much wanted to. The
issue is that it was important for Khrushchev to show that Stalin, and
only Stalin, answer for the entire nightmare of repression and the Party
and the system itself was held hostage by a dictator. Then and later this
myth persisted, designed to protect the essence of the Soviet system and
its principles. Khrushchev could not allow the population to have another
notion about the nature of the regime.

"Then why did Nikolaev shoot Kirov, what drove him, moreover because he
understood that he would be shot?

"The fact is that everything somehow went bad for Nikolaev. From the
beginning of the 1920s to 1934, he changed jobs 13 times, and every new
one was worse than the last. For example, he ran a 'red corner' in a
factory; he was a strange mentally unbalanced person. Today we would say
he was depressed. In April 1934, Nikolaev was fired from the Institute of
Party History. He was also expelled from the Party. He appealed and he was
let back in, but [the Institute] wouldn't take him back. His wife was a
mid-level employee in the Ministry of Heavy Industry, and they didn't have
enough money. But most important, Nikolaev was working class and thought
that everything that had happened to him was extremely unfair for
representative of the proletariat. He wrote letters to Kirov, Stalin, the
Central Committee and the Politburo, but again this did nothing. In 1956,
the KGB published long excerpts from his diary, as well as what he called
his 'political testament' which shows that he had completely lost touch
with reality. Finally, Nikolaev came to the conclusion, and he writes
about this, that the Soviet government had betrayed the ideals of the
October Revolution, which represented his ideals. He tried to meet with
Kirov--he was arrested by Kirov's security. They interrogated him and set
him home. Shortly thereafter, he began writing his diary, in which he
described his plan to murder Kirov. He wrote about Ryabov and other
revolutionary-terrorists and considered himself a fighter for the
Revolution. However, it needs to be recognized that his writings are not
completely consistent and lend to delusions. Several times he got quite
close to Kirov, for example in the Moscow train station. In the morning
of the murder, he was in Smolny and attempted to get a pass to a Party
meeting. He didn't and they told him 'to come back at 4.' He did and
they gave him his pass. He had a revolver in his pocket. Nikolaev came
out of the toilet as Kirov passed him. He took out his revolver and
fired.

"Where did Nikolaev get his gun?

"Many members of the Party had weapons at that time. All the more so that
Nikolaev participated in collectivization in western Siberia. In the
middle of the 1920s and then in 1931 his gun was registered. As for the
ammunition, he bought them in an NKVD store, since only the NKVD had the
right to sell weapons in the USSR at the time.

"There has been talk that Kirov seduced or attempted to seduce Nikolaev's
wife?

"We know that Kirov had one mistress: his wife was terribly sick and he
had affairs. There's talk about his passion for a ballerina at the
Marinskii theater, but Nikolaev's wife was not among his flames.

"You, and many others, have referred to Nikolaev's diary. More
specifically to the part which was published by the KGB. Have you
excluded the possibility that the NKVD destroyed other evidence that
proved that Nikolaev was not a lone gunman?

"Anything is possible. As you know, during the show trial in 1938 a
version was floated that Genrikh Yagoda, who had already been shot,
ordered Zaprozhets (Ivan Zaprozhets (1885-1937, deputy head of the
Leningrad NKVD), and he turned to Nikolaev to kill Kirov. This version is
a clear falsification. There is a bulk of evidence: Zaporozhets was not
in Leningrad the months before the murder occurred. In my book, I dwell
on another version in detail where Stalin, or Kaganovich, or Molotov, who
saw Kirov as their rival, using a lower level NKVD employee, gave the
understanding that they wanted to eliminate Kirov. It is completely
unclear how Kirov stood in their way. In contrast to the well known myths,
Kirov was far from a serious opponent of Stalin, he was not an alternative
leader. He, however, consistently followed the line of the Central
Committee and comrade Stalin. He was much more loyal that others, and the
legend that there were hundreds votes against the leader of the Party at
the XVII Party Congress is also a myth created in Khrushchev's time to
show that the Party was not responsible for the terror and that it
attempted to stop Stalin in 1934. I repeat this is a myth. By the way,
Stalin personally promoted Kirov, he created him, appointed him to such an
important post as the first secretary of Leningrad. So what sense does it
make that he would kill Kirov? It's another question whether he would
have shot him later like many others.

"To blame Zinoviev and Kamenev and unleash a bloodbath, no?

"That is how Stalin used the assassination as a justification for mass
repression, for which he was a genius. For the USSR, the consequences of
Kirov's murder were much more important than the murder itself. But--and
this is one more argument against the version about an order for Kirov's
murder--the actions of Nikolaev created a very dangerous precedent: if
someone could decide to kill one of the leaders of the Party, he could
have followers. Second, Nikolaev was from the working class, and this was
also an unpleasant fact for the authorities: the proletariat, is not like
the kulak, not like another hostile element, but it was precisely a person
from the working class who lifted his hand against a fellow Party member.
And therefore, as a result, they hid the fact that Nikolaev was from the
working class. The NKVD thought up a certain 'Leningrad Terrorist
Center' and made Nikolaev the center of this organization. In December
1934, Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested, and they were accused of 'moral
responsibility for the murder', and also for plotting a conspiracy with
the purpose of removing Stalin. In August 1936, both already 'admitted'
to the Kirov murder, and this became the basis for the first in a series
of show trials. Then Bukharin and Rykov were arrested and a whole line of
other people (the NKVD had found proof of their involvement), and a second
show trial followed in March 1938.

"In your book, you explore the Stalin era in detail. Do you think that
without Stalin's industrialization based on Gulag slavery and mass
executions, the Soviet Union would have been unable to gain the power to
win the war with Germany?

"No, I hold the opposite opinion. Many researchers show that the
repressions, including those in the Red Army, in many ways became the
reason that the first eighteen months of the war were so disastrous. The
same studies show that if the policy of NEP was continued, the Soviet
Union would have been much better prepared and thus millions of people
would not have been killed."
http://seansrussiablog.org/2009/12/15/dissecting-kirovs-murder/

***
Lenoe's point about the danger of "copycat" assassins was made by Adam Ulam many years ago in his biography of Stalin. [1] (Andrew Smith, an American radical who was working in a Soviet factory at that time, recalls in *I Was A Soviet Worker* that workers smiled at the news of Kirov's assassination "when they were sure they were not being observed by the propagandists" and one even told Smith "It would have been much better if it had been Stalin instead of Kirov." https://books.google.com/books?id=EydhXqizgkQC&pg=PA158) This may be one reason why ostensibly "private" shootings were not Stalin's typical way of dealing with someone who was inconvenient but whom he did not want to arrest. More typical was to arrange for the victim to die in a "traffic accident" or--if Stalin wanted to make it seem that the victim had been killed by enemies of the regime--to announce that the victim was the subject of a "medical murder" (which unlike a shooting was not something that large numbers of Soviet citizens could dream of accomplishing).

Anyway, at least now it seems plausible--though hardly certain--that Nikolaev acted alone. (A few decades ago, Ulam's view to that effect was a distinct minority position among western historians of the Soviet Union.) So suppose he did. Now let us suppose as our POD that he decides to kill not Kirov but himself. (Of course if he decided to kill Stalin that would be more interesting, but by 1934 this would have been pretty difficult to accomplish.) The obvious answer is that Stalin would have found some other excuse to launch the Great Terror. This is not quite *totally* certain. It is theoretically possible that the assassination pushed Stalin over the edge into into a determination to achieve the physical liquidation of real, potential, or imagined enemies. [2] Still, given Stalin's vengeful and suspicious nature, given the Bolshevik line that "class enemies" were everywhere and would undoubtedly try to make common cause with dissatisfied elements in the party itself, given that a war with Germany, if not imminent, was certainly a future possibility, and that in the event of Soviet setbacks in such a war Stalin's position might be jeopardized and former Oppositionists might make a comeback--given all these things, a Great Terror seems far more likely than not. Admittedly, Nikolaev made it easy to blame Zinoviev and Kamenev because Nikolaev was a Leningrader and Zinoviev represented the pre-Kirov regime in Leningrad. (And once you blamed Zinoviev and Kamenev, first for "moral responsibility" for the murder and then for actual culpability, blaming the "Trotskyists" was easy, because Zinoviev and Kamenev had aligned themselves with Trotsky in the "United Opposition" of 1926. And then going after former "Rightists" was easy because of Bukharin's famous meeting with Kamenev in 1928...[3]) But if there were no Nikolaev some other excuse could be found--for example, industrial accidents (which were common with the breakneck pace of industrialization) could be blamed (and in OTL were) on sabotage by former Oppositionists (after their "recantations" in the late 1920's and early 1930's many held managerial positions). They in turn would implicate Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin, etc. for giving them "orders" to wreck Soviet industry...

But would Kirov himself be the victim of such a terror? I am by no means certain. The purges and executions struck savagely not only at former Oppositionists, but at a very large percent of second-level and regional leaders who had apparently always been loyal to Stalin. However, if you look at the Politburo itself, you will find that of the eight full members in 1934 other than Stalin and Kirov--Andreyev, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Kosior, Kuibyshev, Molotov, and Ordzhonikidze--four (Andreyev, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Molotov) survived Stalin and two (Kalinin and Kuibyshev) seem to have died of natural causes, though in the case of Kuibyshev there are certainly questions--his death, to all appearances of heart disease and alcoholism, was later blamed on "medical murder" ordered by Yagoda; this may have been a case of framing Yagoda for a natural death, or of blaming him for carrying out something Stalin himself ordered. (As Simon Sebag Montefiore has observed in *Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar*, "We are now entering a phase of such devious criminality and shameless gangsterism that all deaths of prominent people are suspect. But not every death cited as 'murder' in Stalin's show trials was indeed foul play; one has to conclude there were some natural deaths in the 1930s. Kuibyshev's son Vladimir believed his father was killed but this heroic drinker had been ill for a while. The magnates lived such an unhealthy existence that it is amazing so many survived to old age..." http://books.google.com/books?id=f-HerzgvxssC&pg=PA167) On the Kirov murder itself, Montefiore writes, "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..." https://books.google.com/books?id=f-HerzgvxssC&pg=PA167)

So it's not inconceivable that Kirov could actually survive Stalin. Could he even be a candidate to succeed him? I doubt it, if only because of his age--he would be 67 when Stalin died, substantially older than Khrushchev, Malenkov, Beria, and even Molotov. Still, he would be younger than Andropov and Chernenko when they became General Secretary...

[1] "It is unlikely that Stalin would have wanted to establish the precedent of a successful assassination attempt against a high Soviet official. [In a footnote, Ulam adds that during the purges, many people were made to confess to unsuccessful designs on the lives of Stalin, Molotov, etc., but that the only allegedly *successful* murder attempts which the regime chose to publicize were those by doctors attending high Soviet officials; "and these of course could not offer much encouragement to the average person entertaining murderous designs."] Anyone familiar with the history of the Russian revolutionary movement must know how intoxicating the news of a successful political assassination can be to victims of political oppression. 'A sixteen-year-old student was said to have declared, "They have killed Kirov; now let them kill Stalin"', states one of the many similar reports found in the archives of the Smolensk Party organization. One finds there also reports of Komsomol members from rural regions singing a ditty, 'When Kirov was killed, they allowed free trade in bread; when Stalin is killed, all the kolkhozes will be divided up.' There was every conceivable reason for Stalin to try to keep assassination as a state monopoly, rather than to encourage the notion that it could be the product of private enterprise..." *Stalin: The Man and His Era*, p. 385. https://books.google.com/books?id=gOImZ1q6v2MC&pg=PA385

[2] Harold Shukman writes in *Redefining Stalinism* that "[Alfred] Rieber...makes a strong case that the combined grievous effect of his second wife's death (likely by suicide) and Kirov's murder made Dzhugashvili see 'himself as the victim', prompting 'a form of vengeance in the code of blood revenge.'" https://books.google.com/books?id=OY8rBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA126

[3] The purpose of this meeting was to talk Kamenev out of forming a bloc with Stalin against the "Rightists." The meeting was supposed to be secret, but Kamenev made a detailed record of it, which he showed to Zinoviev, and which fell into the hands of the Trotskyists, and Trotsky--who was hostile to Bukharin and indignant at Kamenev's and Zinoviev's "capitulation" to Stalin--made it public. See http://books.google.com/books?id=zQ8BO3cenfoC&pg=PA198
 
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The Great Terror is delayed by a year or so.

That means the revival of the Red Army after the Great Terror is also delayed.

Could this undermine Soviet performance at Nomonhan?

Would it affect Stalin's position during the Polish crisis?

Might it also affect the Winter War?
 
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