Stalin's Agent by Boris Volodarsky

Author:Boris Volodarsky [Volodarsky, Boris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199656585
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2014-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

And Mironov never served in Leningrad; he only came there to investigate Kirov’s murder.

From Orlov’s Secret History, written almost twenty years after Kirov’s murder: ‘I was not in the Soviet Union at that time, and my only sources of information were the official announcements of the Moscow press.’ 64

At the end of March 1990 Alexander Yakovlev, adviser to the first Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, addressed the Politburo Commission to request a new investigation of the Kirov assassination. An authoritative investigation team was formed. It included senior members of the Prosecutor General’s investigation department, the Chief Military Prosecutor’s office staff, the KGB, and the party Control Commission. This imposing panel studied all available documents in every Soviet archive and interviewed witnesses. They also rechecked evidence, documents, and the conclusions of three previous investigations. In June the panel presented a detailed forty-four-page report. It was established without any reasonable doubt that the crime had be committed by a single individual (Nikolaev) and that neither the NKVD nor Stalin had anything to do with it. But the Soviet dictator certainly used Kirov’s assassination to unleash his own wave of repression, which took thousands of lives even before the Great Terror.

The final conclusion of the Yakovlev Commission sent to the last Soviet Minister of Interior, who was at the same time a Member of the Politburo, intended putting an end to this ‘crime of the century’:

To Comrade Pugo

NOT FOR PUBLICATION

No St-87(k)

March 26, 1990

A memorandum examined by the commission provided a comprehensive analysis of facts and documents gathered by the Central Committee commissions appointed in the 1950s and 1960s to explore the circumstances surrounding S. M. Kirov’s murder. The basic conclusions of the most recent investigation were that the available evidence indicates that the act of terrorism perpetrated against S. M. Kirov was planned and committed by Nikolaev alone. In 1933–34 there was no counterrevolutionary terrorist organization in Leningrad, nor any so-called Leningrad Centre. There is no proof on which to base any accusation that G. Ya. Biseneks [George Bisenieks, who was accused of providing a contact between the assassin and Trotsky in exile], the former consul of bourgeois Latvia in Leningrad, was involved in arranging Kirov’s murder. There is also no proof of a plot to murder Kirov involving his bodyguard, M. V. Borisov, who died in an automobile accident. And finally the memorandum states that there is no evidence confirming the involvement of I. V. Stalin and the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs [NKVD] in organizing and carrying out Kirov’s murder, either in the criminal case files on Nikolayev et al., or in the documents uncovered by the investigations conducted in 1957–1967 and 1988–1989.

[signed] A. Yakovlev 65

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