Leonid Nikolayev (b. 1904) was a misfit. He had been born in Leningrad, the son of an alcoholic (who died when the boy was three or four), suffered from rickets as a toddler, and developed bowed legs. He left school around age twelve, when his mother, a night cleaning woman at a tram depot, apprenticed him to a watch repairman. But 1917 had revolutionized Nikolayev’s fortunes: he served as a village soviet chairman in 1919–20, while barely a teenager; became a candidate and, within a month, a full member of the party in 1924 (during the “levy” following Lenin’s death); and got appointed as a Communist Youth League functionary in Zinoviev’s Leningrad machine.59 Nikolayev was sent to the nearby town of Luga, where he met and, in 1925, married Milda Draule (b. 1901), an ethnic Latvian and gymnasium graduate, petite, round-faced, with brown hair, who worked as a bookkeeper in the county party apparatus and was a zealot, too. She and Leonid moved in with his mother, grandmother, unmarried sister, married sister, and brother-in-law in Leningrad, and in 1927 the couple had their first child, whom they named Karl Marx (“Marx” for short). Milda quit working for a time. The Five-Year Plan had opened further horizons for working-class offspring such as Nikolayev, but matters went sour. He had a quarrelsome nature. In 1929, he was fired from his latest job (as a clerk at the Red Arsenal Factory), and then from another factory, and in spring 1930 he was mobilized by the party to Eastern Siberia for the sowing and harvest campaigns.
Milda got hired as a bookkeeper in the Leningrad provincial party apparatus, now under Kirov, and was soon promoted to the department for light industry personnel. Nikolayev returned from Siberia in 1931, and in April he got a position as an assessor in the provincial party apparatus. In November 1931, the couple had a second child, Leonid. They were able to obtain a three-room apartment in a fee-based cooperative. Her elderly, infirm parents lived with them.60 But in the meantime he had been shifted to the Youth League’s Down with Illiteracy Society, his thirteenth place of work (as recorded in his official labor book).61 Acquaintances got him a post in the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate, but he was fired in October 1932. Draule had lost her provincial party sinecure, being transferred in August 1933 to the provincial heavy-industry bookkeeping squad, at first as a temporary worker, though she obtained regular status in January 1934 and was awarded prizes. Nikolayev signed on as an itinerant lecturer for the Institute of Party History, in the provincial party organization, but on March 31, 1934, he was summoned before a party commission for refusing “mobilization” to transport (to give lectures to railroad workers). A party meeting deemed him “rude, extremely unrestrained, hysterical.” After he spoke, one of the members asked, “Is Nikolayev’s psychological condition normal?”62
Nikolayev was expelled from the party and fired, losing his ration coupons. On appeal, his expulsion was reversed in May 1934, and replaced by a severe reprimand—still a black mark in his file. Out of work, angry at perceived party slights, and reduced to living off his wife’s earnings, he petitioned like a demon to overturn his reprimand and secure what he regarded as suitable employment for a working-class Communist—as an apparatchik. In July 1934, he wrote to Kirov, and on August 25 to Stalin, only to have his letters rerouted to the perceived source of his troubles: the Leningrad party machine.63 On October 9, with his family facing eviction from their cooperative apartment, a despairing Nikolayev wrote to the politburo, “I request that I be given in the first instance, in the shortest possible time, treatment at a sanatorium-resort, but if such a possibility does not exist, then I must give up belief and hope in a rescue.” This letter, too, was rerouted to the Leningrad party.64 Nikolayev began stalking Kirov. On October 15, he trailed him on the long walk from the Uritsky (Tauride) Palace to the Trinity Bridge and on toward his residence, in the elite building at Red Dawn Street, 26–28. (Chekhov had lived there before the revolution.) The guard detained Nikolayev and took him to NKVD headquarters (“the House of Tears,” as he called it).