The left front in culture was for Stalin not only an aesthetic but a political threat. He considered it part of the left opposition to his political line. Very adept at using art for political gain, Stalin always regarded it in a broader social context. Even though his moves in the political and cultural spheres were not necessarily always simultaneous, the general direction of his strategy in both almost always coincided. And often clamping down in cultural life was a harbinger of pressure in the political sphere. Thus, the bureaucratic centralization of cultural activity and the imposition of socialist realism preceded one of the turning points in prewar Soviet history: the assassination on December 1, 1934, in Leningrad of the Communist Party leader Sergei Kirov, which some historians dubbed “the murder of the century.”
This killing, which stunned the Soviet Union, had tragic consequences for Leningrad. A high Party official and friend of Stalin, Kirov had been his satrap in Leningrad since 1926, replacing Zinoviev, Lenin’s comrade-in-arms, who did not suit Stalin and was a leader of the internal Communist Party “opposition.” The subsequent development of events turned Kirov into a national hero, while Zinoviev was presented for years afterward only in a negative light. In this respect the case of Kirov resembles the situation with Lenin: reminiscences by people who knew him blend contemporary feelings with an overlay of emotions added later.
Energetic, attractive, and a good orator, Kirov was a comparatively well-read man who followed contemporary literature and devoted a lot of attention to Leningrad culture.110 He was a patron of Lopukhov, encouraging the choreographer’s experiments in using modern plots in ballet.111 Kirov also frequently attended the opera. He did not care for
That Kirov might have been killed on Stalin’s orders was discussed openly in the Soviet Union after the mid-fifties. But the rumor spread in Leningrad almost immediately. Kirov was shot in a corridor of the former Smolny Institute, which became the Communist Party’s headquarters in Soviet times. A popular jingle of the period went:
The official reaction to Kirov’s death was naturally quite different. It was immediately announced that the enemies of the Soviet state were behind the murder. Many people were truly shocked and frightened. Zabolotsky dedicated a poem to Kirov that appeared in the newspaper Izvestiya three days after his murder. It began
Kirov’s bier lay in state in the Tauride Palace, with Stalin, who had arrived by special train from Moscow, as one of the honor guards. “Huge crowds of Leningraders moved along Shpalernaya Street to bid him farewell. I also walked in that sorrowing and anxious crowd, also felt in that event something of a watershed, a transition to a new era that promised we knew not what,” recalled Nikolai Chukovsky.
The most terrible foreboding of the city’s inhabitants came to pass. Mass arrests and executions began instantly. “The words ‘execution’ and ‘shoot’ became so ordinary in our daily lives that they lost meaning. Only the shell remained, an empty combination of sounds. The real meaning of the word did not reach our brains. It was worn off, like a counterfeit coin,” wrote Lyubov Shaporina, the author of one of the rare surviving honest diaries of the period.113
The “investigation” of the circumstances of Kirov’s death—actually nothing less than the organization of mass terror in Leningrad—was entrusted by Stalin to the infamous Yakov Agranov, who in 1921 had fabricated the “case” against Gumilyov on Zinoviev’s orders. But now Agranov was obeying Stalin, and one of his first victims was Zinoviev. Stalin accused Zinoviev of being the mastermind behind Kirov’s murder. This gave him the opportunity to put an end for good to opposition within the Party. But the consequences of the Kirov case reached much farther. It was Stalin’s pretext for unleashing the Great Terror of 1936-1938, in which millions of people perished.
