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alternatehistory.com
Been lurking for some time on the forum but only signed up yesterday. When I was studying Russian in college, I had to take a lot of Russian history. One of my major presentations was on the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934. For those on the forum who don't speak Russian, my screen name actually means, "Who killed Sergei Mironovich Kirov?" Then, I got the idea for an alternate history based off a point of divergence where Kirov survives and takes over the government when the Central Committee has had enough of Stalin and replaces him with one of the few guys who had the balls to stand up to him in public. Does he improve conditions in the USSR? Does WWII take a different course or even happen at all? Is there still a Cold War afterwards? Does the Soviet Union survive into the present day? Or does it all turn out pretty similar to our timeline but with a different guy in the Kremlin?
OTL: On 1 December 1934, Leningrad party head S. M. Kirov was assassinated in his office by Leonid Nikolayev, a mentally unstable man who had been expelled from the Communist Party and who had previously been arrested trying to sneak a pistol into the Smolny Institute in Leningrad but been allowed to leave with the weapon a month or so before the assassination. Very suspicious, and there are as many theories on who was involved as there are theories on who shot JFK in our country. Hell, Kirov even looked a bit like Kennedy. Stalin, while he may or may not have been involved in the planning of the murder, used it as a pretext to begin his Great Purge, killing millions of mostly innocent Soviet citizens and ushering in a reign of iron-fisted brutality that lasts until his own death in 1953. ATL assumes that Stalin wasn't involved and the murder was Genrikh Yagoda's idea.
ATL: On 1 December 1934, Nikolayev walks up behind Kirov, puts his loaded M1895 Nagant revolver to the back of the party boss's head, pulls the trigger... and the weapon jams. Kirov wheels around and struggles with his attacker. He and his lone NKVD guard Borisov subdue Nikolayev and interrogate him. Nikolayev reveals that Vania Zaporozhets, an NKVD officer attached to Kirov's guard, was involved. Kirov has his personal guard reshuffled and Zaporozhets investigated. He now has reason to suspect Yagoda's involvement.