Another day, another stupid anti-Stalin book

Amy Knight
Who Killed Kirov? The Kremlin's Greatest Mystery
(New York: Hill & Wang, 1999), 331 pp.

reviewed by MC5

Amy Knight's book jacket biography reads like a perfect CIA cover. 
She works for the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian 
Studies at George Washington University, wrote two books about the 
KGB (the internal police and intelligence of the Soviet Union) and 
lives in McLean, Virginia. This book appears at the heavily 
trafficked crossroads of academia, government and journalism. It 
is simplistic Cold War propaganda embellished with some details of 
Kirov's life, so not surprisingly it boasts recommendations from a 
former U.S. general, a Harvard writer, a George Washington 
reviewer and right-wing Sovietologist Walter Laquer, who often 
finds Hitler preferable to Stalin, as MIM discussed in MIM Theory 
#6, the Stalin Issue.

Sergei Kirov was the second-ranking Soviet official under Stalin 
in 1934 when an assassin killed him with a bullet to the neck 
while he was in the hallway of a Communist Party institute 
building. As the most popular leader in the Soviet Union, in 
death, Kirov spurred widespread and intense public support for a 
crackdown on people deviating from the Stalin line, so much so 
that the imperialist mouthpieces write endlessly about how Stalin 
may have had Kirov killed to justify the subsequent crackdown and 
to secure his own power. Because the book focuses on Kirov, Knight 
is able to get away with saying merely in passing that the Soviet 
Union lived under a totalitarian regime without any proof.

In fact, Knight makes the assertion that Stalin's 1932 push for 
rightist Riutin's execution would have been the first year a party 
member was executed--an historically inaccurate assertion because 
Trotsky had party members executed during the civil war, but 
contradicting her own statements on "totalitarianism" 
nonetheless.(p. 156) If the Soviet Union were so totalitarian, 
then one would have thought there would have been at least one 
execution of party contenders for power before 1932 once Stalin 
came to power in 1924. Yet, even according to Knight, execution of 
party members was not even on the agenda for 8 years while Stalin 
was in power-- so much for her own pseudo-theory of 
totalitarianism in the Soviet Union.

Knight writes as a moralistic journalist who hews to a simple line 
of Stalin as all evil. Of Kirov she writes: "He still deserved his 
reputation as a 'moderate' Bolshevik; he was not a vindictive 
dogmatist, and he exhibited no penchant for wanton cruelty. But in 
aligning himself with Stalin and professing support for his 
leadership, he had entered upon a life of moral compromise."(p. 
11) We ask our readers to remember that Knight admits on the one 
hand that Kirov aligned himself with Stalin and rallied tremendous 
support for him, more than any other individual; yet she also 
simultaneously argues that Stalin had this supporter killed. Even 
the Stalin-as-power-struggler theory--as simple and sterile as it 
is--seems undermined by Knight's venom. She believes Stalin killed 
off his supporters, which makes no sense from a power struggle 
point of view. So as usual this is the bourgeoisie trying to have 
its cake and eat it too.

Knight is also one of those countless bourgeois moralists who 
write about the violence organized by an actor such as Stalin or 
Kirov without calculating the violence that those same actors have 
eradicated. For Knight, violence is a matter of abstention or 
implementation--at least when it comes to the Soviet Union and 
violence. She writes as if a major political leader can simply 
abstain from violence and have no blame for the violence of the 
status quo. This is a pre-scientific attitude, because in reality, 
there is no non-violent country, no non- violent society and no 
non-violent government in the world. There is only a choice 
between more and less violent, a choice that Knight does not 
confront head on with the comparisons that an intelligent 
scientist of social and political life should make.

Knight ends the book saying that the ex-Soviet people must come to 
grips with their Stalin era past, but in truth it is Knight who 
should come to grips with the violence of the current bourgeois 
regime in Russia. It is now no secret that the average life 
expectancy of Russia is where it was 45 years ago despite leaps 
and bounds in medical progress in the world since then. When it 
comes to its health, Russia is back where it was just before 
Khruschev first denounced Stalin. Knight makes no calculation of 
which society is actually more violent--the one lived in by Stalin 
or the one set up by people with Amy Knight's views. Rather she 
one- sidedly reports the violence of Stalin and his comrades.

Details of Kirov's political line

The only benefit we see to this book is that it highlights Kirov 
and hence we learn some details about his line that do not often 
come out.

In the early years, we learn that Kirov gained his experience in 
the southern parts of the Soviet Union, near where the Chechens 
are making news today. The region is called the Caucasus and 
Transcaucasus. 

In this region, we learn that Kirov united with Mensheviks much 
longer than other Bolsheviks did, right into 1918.(pp. 35, 60) He 
also wrote for bourgeois journals and some said with too much 
enthusiasm. Although this evidence is important, we find it 
incomplete, because there is nothing specific from Lenin or Stalin 
that shows that they disagreed with his tactics in his locality, 
even while on the whole Lenin called for split from the Mensheviks 
much earlier.

On the plus side, while Kirov did unite with the Mensheviks in his 
locality, he did side with Lenin in general disputes and 
especially he always sided with Lenin against Trotsky.(p. 35) 
Eventually Kirov pushed Mensheviks and others in his locale to 
recognize Lenin's Bolshevik government established in 1917. When 
he failed with persuasion in 1918, Kirov participated in the civil 
war on behalf of Bolshevism by leading the war effort in his 
region.(p. 71)

After the civil war, we learn that Kirov followed the leadership 
of a senior party leader in his region, one Sergo Ordzhonikidze 
who was also Kirov's best friend. Ordzhonikidze and Kirov both 
ended up being important members of the Politburo while Stalin was 
leader.

The link to Ordzhonikidze is important to follow through. Stalin, 
Kirov and Ordzhonikidze all earned their spurs in this same 
region--and one thing that united them was an argument against 
Lenin. These three favored immediate armed action to liberate 
Armenia,(p. 91) while Lenin generally favored a slower more 
Liberal approach on national struggle in these non-Russian areas. 
Stalin especially tended to push for armed internationalism at the 
expense of local national feelings. In fact, contrary to the 
Trotskyist spin today that Stalin was against socialism in many 
localities, Stalin was the hard- liner for socialism in many 
countries in practice. Generally siding with Lenin on his 
deathbed, Trotsky actually asked for the expulsion of Kirov in 
1923 precisely because Kirov was pushing too hard for the 
Armenians, Georgians and Azeri peoples to give up their 
ethnicities and petty nationalism.(pp. 100- 1)(MIM would say that 
the fighting in places like Azerbaijan today, ex-Yugoslavia and 
the Chechen area may be proof of the need for Stalin's and Kirov's 
approach.)

In 1921, the party appointed Kirov to be the top leader in 
Azerbaijan,(p. 95) a predominantly Muslim province. He served 
there four and a half years and set the oil industry on its feet 
with Lenin's active intervention and aid.(pp. 96-8) While he was 
in Azerbaijan he complained about the secret police organized by 
Lavrentii Beria, who later became head of the (NKVD) internal 
police of the whole Soviet Union (1938-1953).

Hence, all along, Kirov never liked Trotsky and he was in this 
sense a natural ally for Stalin. With regard to the next major 
inner-party split after Trotsky, Kirov won victory against the 
Zinoviev- Kamanev so-called line. Kirov also moved on to side 
against Bukharin. To her credit in detailing Kirov's line, Knight 
found that Kirov vacillated slightly in the struggle against 
Bukharin before siding with Stalin.(pp. 129-30) She brings forward 
evidence that Kirov did have some views in common with Bukharin.

On the topic of slight differences with Stalin, Kirov also wrote 
an article in 1929 obliquely referring to "Lenin's Testament";(p. 
139) even though the party had ruled a discussion of Lenin's 
actual "Last Testament" off-limits long ago. Although she cannot 
prove that Stalin knew of this speech, Knight asserts that it 
would have angered Stalin and given him his usual cause for murder 
in the eyes of the imperialist mouthpieces--a threat to his 
persynal power. On the other hand, the reference to Lenin's 
assessment of Stalin was slight, and defended Stalin, the way 
Stalin sometimes defended himself with regard to those words of 
Lenin. (We now know subsequently that Stalin asked the party twice 
to follow Lenin's advice and remove him from his posts.)

We also give Knight credit for bringing forward and admitting that 
Ordzhonikidze did have links to Beso Lominadze that he kept 
secret. She also admitted that Lominadze was plotting to remove 
Stalin.(pp. 151-2) Next, Kirov was the party leader preventing 
right-wing nut Riutin from being executed. A picture does 
consolidate of Kirov having a slightly right- ward tinge compared 
with Stalin in the early 1930s. Ironically while Kirov preached 
relative non-violence toward his enemies at the time and he even 
avoided use of his own guards, like Martin Luther King, he died at 
the hands of violent enemies of progress. The Soviet masses drew 
profound lessons from this.

The role of the individual in history

According to Knight, no one but Stalin could have organized a 
conspiracy to kill Kirov.(p. 17)Yet several commissions appointed 
to look into the matter concluded that Stalin was not 
responsible(1956, p. 263), and only one(1960, p. 264) found 
otherwise, only to have its conclusions reversed by subsequent 
commissions working under Khruschev, Brezhnev and Gorbachev from 
1961 to 1990. Three such verdicts clearing Stalin occurred between 
1957 and 1967 alone. (pp. 264-5) Knight admits this and the fact 
that the scholar with the most access to the archives has come out 
in favor of Stalin not being the culprit(p. 190), and still Knight 
pins her hopes on absurd ideologues like herself such as Aleksandr 
Iakovlev-- who was not involved in an investigation but 
nonetheless protested to Gorbachev when even Gorbachev's appointed 
commission determined that Stalin was not involved.(p. 19)

Perhaps as a result of the commissions that went against her own 
subjective conclusions, Knight concludes that just about everyone 
in Russia was conspiring to cover up Stalin's role in the Kirov 
assassination. She condemns Molotov, Khruschev, Brezhnev, 
Gorbachev and even Yeltsin,(p. 266) thus undermining her own 
credibility and ranging into crackpot territory.

MIM had no idea how little credibility in the traditional 
bourgeois historical sense of lining up various speakers and 
sources the idea of Stalin's culpability has. So many sources back 
the idea that Stalin was not involved. After Stalin died, even 
Stalin's bodyguard said in 1964 that Nikolaev complained bitterly 
that he had no accomplices.(p. 207) Knight had to ignore that and 
also counteract a Leningrad librarian who said, "Kirov was known 
to the entire city as a skirt-chaser, (sic.) he'd had affairs with 
all the female staff of the obkom, including Nikolaev's wife."(p. 
207) Moreoever, traitor to communism Leon Trotsky said the Kirov 
assassination was NKVD bungling of an attempt to tar the 
opposition, not a Stalin plot. The NKVD had intended to catch 
Nikolaev and make an example of him according to Trotsky(p. 260) 
Even a defector to the West from the NKVD involved in the 
investigation believed it was Nikolaev alone who killed Kirov.(p. 
212)

While Knight has to ignore that sort of evidence that it was not 
Stalin, amongst the crucial evidence that Knight says the 
commissions ignored was the letters from Kirov complaining he was 
too hot (climate-wise!) while on vacation with Stalin. Having 
bought silly mouthpiece views of "totalitarianism," Knight reads 
in all kinds of resistance to Stalin and a basis for political 
enmity from complaints to a wife about hot weather in Sochi.(p. 
266) All that Knight accomplishes by raising this point is proving 
her own political and scientific shallowness. Perhaps she has 
little to think about other than the weather and her own schedule, 
but Kirov and Stalin were not this sort.

A minute's thought about the converse of what Knight is saying 
would be useful. Unless someone never complained about anything, 
like the heat in summer, Knight would say the persyn was a critic 
of Stalin about to be killed by him. If so, the Soviet peoples all 
would have been killed off completely. It's logical lapses like 
this that make writing biographies such a dangerous use of energy. 
It's very difficult to prove anything with reference to one persyn 
at a time.

Amy Knight is the first writer that I have read to speculate that 
Leonid V. Nikolaev was not even the real assassin of Kirov.(e.g., 
p. 227) Usually the anti-Stalin writers say Stalin manipulated 
Nikolaev and the NKVD into killing Kirov. To say that Nikolaev was 
not involved is again ranging into crackpot speculation. However, 
even Knight speaks in most of the book as if Nikolaev were the 
assassin. It's not surprising, because she has no concrete 
evidence that anyone other than Nikolaev slipped in and out of the 
building to kill Kirov and there is voluminous evidence including 
a confession and witnesses that Nikolaev did kill Kirov.

When it comes to assessing what climate or contribution people 
other than the assassin made to the assassination of Kirov, Knight 
holds a double standard. When it comes to an indirect role, any 
fact such as uncomfortable weather can be interpreted to prove 
Stalin's guilt, but when it comes to the anti-Stalin and anti-
Kirov political climate whipped up by the bourgeoisie, there is no 
fact that can prove that anyone had an indirect role in Kirov's 
assassination according to Knight.

The bourgeoisie revisits this question again and again. The Nazi 
sympathizers revisit this question, because had Kirov not been 
assassinated, maybe the Soviet people would have been more relaxed 
and an easier target for attack. The Liberal imperialists are also 
wondering about this because they are wondering how best to 
advance their side of the class struggle. In this case, they 
managed to see a communist leader killed, but incredible support 
rallied to the communist cause as a result. No wonder the Liberal 
imperialists can't help wondering how they blundered so and why 
they squirm desperately to pin the assassination on Stalin 
himself.

An example of how evidence only sticks to Stalin in Knight's mind, 
she admits that when Kirov first went to Leningrad, he faced open 
hostility from the party organization there.(p. 114) Even after 
Zinoviev's supporters were removed from office, the local party 
managed to block Kirov's appointment, which Moscow had 
recommended.(p. 114) Kirov was there to oust the Zinoviev and 
Kamenev supporters who opposed the Stalin line. She admits that 
Zinoviev supporters organized a group which said it was going to 
kill Kirov in 1933.(p. 167) Moreover, she admits that there were 
several death threats in 1934 and even an assassination attempt 
against Kirov in Kazakhstan.(p. 183) Yet somehow, according to 
Knight, these various disgruntled Zinoviev supporters (including 
people Knight admits were "troublemakers" of the traditional 
criminal sort) were not part of a conspiracy while Stalin was.

As a result of the threats against Kirov, his bodyguard increased 
to nine people. However, again, Knight admits that Kirov opposed 
bodyguards and sought to avoid them.(p. 189) Kirov's favorite 
bodyguard M. D. Borisov was 50, slow and always tired(p. 184) 
according to Knight. Hence, she herself gives us an accounting of 
how it was possible to assassinate Kirov without the greatest plot 
in the world. She also provides evidence to suspect that there 
were many threats, and hence it was a matter of time and 
probability.

Nikolaev's motivations

Knight raises the fact that many believe Kirov's womynizing was 
behind Nikolaev's assassination. She admits the rumors that Kirov 
slept with Nikolaev's wife, Milda Draule.(p. 162)

Getting into psychological self-contradiction which is inevitable 
in any psychological train of thought, Knight says on the one hand 
that platonic revolutionary marriages were common.(p. 41) In fact, 
Knight admits that she is unsure about the basis of Kirov's 
relationship to a womyn who he corresponded with and saw for over 
a decade--one Nadezhda Germanova who was married to someone else. 
Was the relationship with Kirov platonic? Was Germanova platonic 
with her husband? Knight admits she does not know the answer to 
either question, while saying it is probable there was an intimate 
relationship between Germanova and Kirov at some point.(p. 162) 
While she makes this sort of admission early in the book, on the 
other hand, later in the book she feels pressed enough that she 
speculates that Nikolaev's wife Milda Draule was too plain for 
Kirov to be chasing, because he supposedly favored ballerinas 
instead(p. 208). Hence, on the one hand, she is not sure whether 
communist men and womyn are marrying for political reasons and on 
the other hand, (and we would say because the line between 
political comradeship and sexual comradeship was thin amongst many 
people as she herself admits by saying she doesn't know which is 
which in these cases) and on the other hand, she believes that 
Kirov might not have had an affair with an important party member 
he worked with because she was supposedly too ugly. Knight proves 
that people were sleeping with each other for political reasons 
and then she says that Kirov was selective for other reasons. 
Apparently it does not occur to Knight that in her eagerness to 
charge Stalin as being the only one with a motivation to kill 
Kirov, she wrote at length on the kind of romantic environment 
that would tend to disprove her accusation.

In response to this, MIM has to say flatly that Stalin was put in 
a bind by the fact of Kirov's womynizing. It is incorrect to 
remember an assassinated comrade for the affairs he had with 
wimmin. Hence, it was correct to hush this up at the time of 
Kirov's death. Kirov's accomplishments far outweighed the 
difficulties he caused the party with his womynizing lifestyle. 
Unfortunately, now people like Knight come along to write what 
they please with all kinds of money from bourgeois publishing 
houses and ruling class oriented universities. If she wanted to 
speculate about motivations for moving Kirov to Leningrad, other 
than the fact that Kirov was regarded the most persuasive speaker 
while Leningrad was the city with the most recalcitrant party 
branch, she should have mentioned that Leningrad was the city 
traditionally with the most Western, Liberal sexual mores, least 
likely to be deeply offended by Kirov's sleeping around. Knight 
did not speculate about that, because it would have undermined her 
case against Stalin.

MIM would also note that it is important in general and not just 
in Kirov's case, that sleeping with married people is a risk that 
party leaders take. It will not result in bad things for the 
revolution in each case, but on the whole, such a lifestyle brings 
some risk to the party. The details of this case that Knight wants 
to dispute so much are not so important as the overall statistical 
fact. Kirov may in fact have been transferred to Leningrad from a 
predominantly Muslim province of the Soviet Union, because he was 
sleeping with too many wimmin who only recently won freedom from 
the veil. In such a situation it was difficult to win public 
opinion over to wimmin's liberation with Kirov sleeping with 
wimmin everywhere. Knight has nothing to say, no details on this 
question, because they would be inconvenient for her case. She 
needs to focus on ballerinas instead of investigating rumors of 
Kirov's more general lust. From MIM's point of view, it is better 
not to write a psychological book like Knight's at all, but since 
she wrote it, MIM has to point out that even on the level of 
investigating Kirov's individual motivations, the book is a 
failure, rather less than thorough. The reason her book lacks 
thoroughness is the blinding hatred for Stalin by the author, a 
blinding hatred that prevents logical thought about her subject 
matter.

The bulk of Knight's case rests on two things: 1) speculations 
concerning Stalin's motives, an easy point for the imperialist 
mouthpieces such as Knight who assume Stalin to be evil incarnate. 
2) the admitted role of the NKVD (internal security) in killing 
Kirov and witnesses to the killing. The reasoning is that since 
some in the NKVD were involved at least in the fishy aftermath of 
the assassination, Stalin must have been involved. Of course, she 
wants us to forget that the party contained enemies of Kirov from 
the Zinoviev/Kamenev battle and also she wants us to forget that 
assassinations like the Kennedy assassinations stir up the masses' 
passions. Just as someone may have killed Borisov, someone named 
Jack Ruby killed John F. Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. In 
both cases, it could be that the masses were just acting on anger 
or other emotions. In the death of Borisov--the man who failed to 
protect Kirov--studies in 1934, 1967 and 1989 concluded that the 
death was an accident from a truck crash.(p. 210) It was Soviet 
security chief (1934-1936) Yagoda at his own trial who raised the 
idea that he had Borisov killed in the guise of an accident and in 
effect, post-Stalin studies have concluded that Yagoda was either 
trying to undermine his own trial or was speaking in metaphor 
about bungling the transport of Kirov's bodyguard the day after 
the assassination.

With regard to Stalin's motivations, moralist Knight is completely 
untroubled by self-contradiction. She admits that successful 
assassination of Kirov would spur others to attempt to assassinate 
other Bolshevik leaders including Stalin. She believes Stalin took 
this risk to himself for some reason that she does not provide 
while simultaneously calling him paranoid.

Knight admits that other bourgeois writers have said Stalin was 
too paranoid to arrange a successful assassination that could 
serve as an example for his own. Yet at the same time, Knight went 
ahead with her view and simultaneously called Stalin guilty of 
"growing paranoia" in 1932(p. 158) and the prime mover behind 
Kirov's assassination in 1934.

As usual the central contradiction in the anti-Stalin propagandist 
concerns Stalin and his motivation for persynal power. On the one 
hand, Stalin seeks to rally supporters; yet on the other hand, 
according to his critics, he killed all his supporters. If he 
rallies people, he is called a schemer for power and if some of 
his supporters become guilty of something and get executed, Stalin 
is scheming for power and if some people died without Stalin 
knowing they were his supporters, he was still guilty of setting 
up the overall system according to the critics. No matter what 
happened, Stalin was to blame according to his critics.

When one official referred to Stalin as "khoziain (master)," 
Knight criticized Stalin for criticizing the official who said it. 
If Stalin had accepted the term, it would have been taken as 
evidence against him and his criticism of the term which "'sounds 
like a rich landowner in Central Asia!'"(p. 160) is also 
criticized. Either way Stalin was damned in Knight's eyes--whether 
he criticized the idea of being master or whether he didn't.

The post that Kirov occupied was another point of self-
contradictory speculation by Knight. When Stalin had Kirov 
promoted to head the Leningrad party, that was seen by Knight as 
boosting Stalin's power by handling the work against Zinoviev 
supporters. Then when Stalin kept insisting that Kirov work in 
Moscow as more befitted the number two leader, Knight referred to 
the numerous promotions as a mere tactic of Stalin to keep Kirov 
"'pinned down.'"(p. 176) She even calls the promotions a form of 
vengeful payback for resisting his geographic reassignments. On 
the other hand, if Stalin had sent Kirov back to Baku in 
Azerbaijan as Kirov had asked all along so as to avoid Leningrad, 
no doubt Knight would have said Stalin was demoting a dangerous 
contender for power. Had Stalin left Kirov in Leningrad while 
Kirov gained more votes for leadership than Stalin did and while 
he was the most popular native Russian speaker in the country, 
Knight would have said that Stalin was breaking with party custom 
for top leaders in order to keep Kirov isolated in Leningrad and 
away from the central strings of power in Moscow. No matter what 
Stalin did about Kirov's party assignments, we can be sure that 
Knight would have damned Stalin.

While Knight generally believed nothing that Stalin said, there 
was one exception. When it came to an admission by Stalin's 
security chief Yagoda that he was involved in Kirov's 
assassination as charged by Stalin, Knight believes the evidence! 
She has to, because to point the finger at Stalin, she has to 
discredit the theory that it was just Nikolaev, and she needs to 
say Stalin managed to kill off all the people who knew the truth, 
including his security chief Yagoda.

Conclusion The title of the book is a sensational attempt to sell 
books. The book is really a biography of Kirov with a minority of 
the book about the assassination and investigations surrounding 
it. The plus side of the book is the focus on details concerning 
Kirov, but the book's simplistic and contradictory moralistic line 
makes it less than worthwhile, even compared with other bourgeois 
books attacking Stalin.