By Wayne Allensworth
Students of history know that political assassinations are nothing new, that powerful political elites ruthlessly dispatch opponents. Thus do the two assassination attempts against former president Donald Trump occasion a look back at Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s removal of a singularly troublesome opponent.
On December 1, 1934, Leonid Nikolayev assassinated Communist Party chief and Soviet Politburo member Sergey Kirov in his offices at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. The circumstances have been debated ever since. The reconstruction I offer here is based on the work of leading scholars of the Soviet period and of the Soviet secret police, such as Amy Knight and Robert Conquest. At the time, the Soviet secret police was the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, headed by Genrikh Yagoda, and Stalin was consolidating his power as Soviet dictator.
Before describing the events of December 1, we should note that Nikolayev was a (probably) mentally disturbed and disgruntled ex-Communist Party member. He had been expelled from the party, had trouble holding a job, and, according to various accounts, blamed party officials for his troubles. One story had it that Nikolayev suspected that his wife, who worked in a local party committee, had an affair with Kirov, the handsome, charismatic Leningrad Party chief. Nikolayev had already attempted to assassinate Kirov in October of that year. Smolny security personnel had arrested him either near the building or as he tried to enter. What’s more, Nikolayev was carrying a briefcase containing a loaded revolver. Yet he was released — and allowed to keep the revolver. The Soviet authorities later maintained that the weapon had been provided to him by a friend with help from Ivan Zaporozhets, an NKVD officer.
Sergey Kirov
Nikolayev returned to Smolny on December 1. The contingent of guards at the Leningrad party headquarters had oddly been considerably thinned out. As he left his office that day on the third floor, Kirov had only one bodyguard, who followed him as he walked down the hall of the institute. Kirov turned a corner and Nikolyaev was waiting for him: He shot Kirov in the back of the neck. Nikolayev was arrested and shot, along with 13 other members of an alleged “counterrevolutionary group,” on December 29.
Kirov’s funeral was a major event, as the Leningrad party chief was quite popular with the rank and file. Stalin pledged to uncover the nest of traitors behind the killing and subsequently used the murder as a pretext for launching the Great Purge of the party that consumed a huge number of Stalin’s party comrades, including potential rivals. Yagoda and Zaporozhets were eventually tried and shot. M.D. Borisov, Kirov’s NKVD bodyguard, died in a car accident the day after the assassination. In his 1956 20th Party Congress speech denouncing Stalin’s “cult of personality,” Nikita Khrushchev blamed the NKVD for Kirov’s murder. The executions of those involved, he said, were meant to cover the tracks of the person or persons behind the Kirov murder, who remained unnamed by Khrushchev.
Knight, Conquest and other researchers have fingered Stalin. Kirov was a friend of Stalin’s and supported Stalin’s collectivization and industrialization plans. But the willful party comrade also stood up to “The Boss” on occasion. The party rumor mill had it that Kirov garnered more votes than Stalin in party Central Committee elections in February, 1934. Stalin allegedly had some ballots destroyed to cover that up. As Knight and Conquest claimed, Stalin, jealous of his power and suspicious of potential rivals, probably verbally ordered Yagoda to eliminate Kirov. No written order has ever surfaced. The Boss was evidently even then concocting a plan for a Great Purge that would leave him as unrivaled dictator.
Stalin (at right) as pallbearer at Kirov’s funeral
If the Kirov assassination and subsequent establishment of Stalin’s total dictatorship rings any bells with readers, again, that’s no surprise. The two recent assassination attempts on Donald Trump, coupled with the apparent incompetence of the Secret Service in the first attempt, and the lack of enhanced security for Trump afterward, have naturally set off alarms among Trump supporters. So far, I doubt that the two shooters were aided in the way that Nikolayev had been. But that doesn’t mean that Trump’s political enemies aren’t to blame. Peter Van Buren, writing in The American Conservative, is on the right track. The propaganda campaign directed against Trump by establishment media, claiming that Trump is an existential threat to “our democracy” and comparing him to Hitler, was meant to signal that Trump deserves to be killed:
It’s OK, they seem to say, because Trump asked for it. “He’s worth killing” is the broader message. “I believe that more Americans have to be willing to endure what frankly is discomforting and to some extent kind of painful, to take him at his word and to be outraged by what he represents,” said Hillary Clinton. “We can’t go back and give this very dangerous man another chance to do harm to our country and the world.”
Unlike in the Third World, there will be no hand-picked assassin here. There is also no conspiracy per se to assassinate Trump. Instead, the left bets that if they send out enough signals, someone mentally ill enough in armed America will do what they want in their hearts. It is the patriotic thing to do, like time-travelers smiting baby Hitler. A jihad.
An apparent lack of official interest in providing Trump with enhanced security as well as insincere and underwhelming expressions of “relief” from political opponents that he had survived also fit the bill. As far back as Trump’s first election campaign in 2016, it occurred to me that the over-the-top anti-Trump rhetoric was a sign of something truly sinister. Globalist pod people harbor a death wish, not for themselves, but for Trump. I don’t think the future of freedom looks good if by hook or crook they manage to destroy Trump and Trumpism. If Trump wins in November, maybe the backup plan would be to throw him in jail. They won’t quit. The pod people can’t tolerate a real rival, let alone a popular, charismatic one. But first, that rival has to get through the campaign alive, as Van Buren noted:
The left is too coordinated in its words and actions not to know what it is doing. Trump knows it; during his debate with Harris he remarked that he took a bullet to the head for some of her remarks that he is anti-democratic. Trump’s would-be assassin knows it, claiming that “democracy is on the ballot.”
What happens next sadly seems to revolve around luck. It was by hair’s breadth away in Butler, Pennsylvania, that the Trump rally did not end with a “back and to the left” blood- and brain-splattered scenario. It was luck that a lone Secret Service agent spotted a gun barrel poking out of cover from the perimeter of the Mar-a-Lago golf course. … [H]ow much more luck can Trump count on to see him through to Election Day?
How much, indeed?
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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