At Stalin’s suggestion, to get Nikolayev to admit complicity in a “group,” he was plied with food, cigarettes, and the usual promises to spare his own and his family members’ lives. Interrogators lied that Milda had not (yet) been arrested. Agranov and his team were making suggestions to him about “ties,” and Nikolayev began to go along, admitting that he did belong to a “group.” He also tried to jump out the window. The interrogators were now interested in his acquaintances Ivan Kotolynov and Nikolai Shatsky, both at one time expelled from the party and figures in Nikolayev’s notebook/diary. Kotolynov was being called a Trotskyite, but, as it happened, he and others had been Communist Youth League functionaries when Zinoviev was party boss.127 Voilà. The names of Zinoviev as well as Kamenev started to crop up in the interrogation protocols, which Agranov was forwarding to Stalin.128 (In the Kirov case, the dictator would receive at least 260 interrogation protocols, a new genre of belles lettres.)129
The NKVD drafted a scenario, which Stalin edited, of parallel terrorist organizations, a “Leningrad Center” and a “Moscow Center.” None of this had been part of the interrogations before December 4, 1934, when Stalin had summoned a large group to his office, including prosecutors, court officials, secret police operatives, and Agranov, who came from Leningrad.130 During discussions over the next several days, Stalin shifted Zinoviev and Kamenev from the Leningrad to the guiding Moscow Center. The Leningrad Center was now said to be led by Nikolayev, Kotolynov, and their associates.131
Amid a mood for bloodthirsty revenge, the ethnic Pole party boss of Ukraine, Kosior, wanted to respond to the assassination with directives for mass relocations of Soviet ethnic Poles from the frontier. But a calculating Stalin softened a secret circular sent by party channels (December 7, 1934) to both Ukraine and Belorussia regarding their ethnic Polish border populations, evidently to avoid complications in Soviet-Polish and Soviet-German relations. By contrast, in response to a plan to deport 5,000 “socially alien” families from the Karelian autonomous republic and Leningrad province—both near the Finnish border, where geopolitical complications were largely absent—Stalin wrote, “Why not more?”132
On December 9, after meetings in his office with the prosecutors, judges, and NKVD officials, among many others, until 7:30 p.m., Stalin suppered one floor below at his Kremlin apartment with Kaganovich, Zhdanov, Orjonikidze, and Molotov, a practice that was becoming increasingly routine. The relatives had come over on the pretext of giving Svetlana, said to be distraught over Kirov’s death, some gifts to cheer her up. “It broke my heart to look at him,” Maria Svanidze wrote in her diary of Stalin at the table. “He is suffering greatly.”133
In Leningrad, fourteen people—all save Shatsky—testified that they had participated in an underground Zinovievite “group,” but all denied complicity in the assassination except Nikolayev. Interrogators had tried to get him to admit that his working-class father had hired laborers, making him the offspring of a class alien, but he refused. Nonetheless, Nikolayev, a working-class Communist of conviction—precisely why he had killed Kirov—somehow had to be turned into a “class enemy.” Over time, the wily Agranov seems to have persuaded him that he could realize one more great deed: the destruction of the Zinovievites. Nikolayev apparently would not fully realize until later that this task on behalf of the cause required retrospectively making
Accused Zinovievites were arrested in waves, and one turned out to be hiding the archives of the Zinoviev opposition. (All told, 843 “former Zinovievites” would be arrested by the NKVD in the ten weeks after the murder; thousands would be exiled administratively.) The few core genuine supporters of Zinoviev did not hide their critical feelings toward Stalin and his policies: they believed, for example, that Hitler’s rise in Germany had resulted from Comintern passivity.134 They also freely admitted that they occasionally met and discussed these views. And so it was “an organization” and “anti-party.” They were also found to have copies of Lenin’s Testament and the Ryutin appeal calling for Stalin’s removal, and almost every one of them turned out to have a gun at home, sometimes more than one, usually acquired and held legally since civil war days. And so it was “terrorism,” too.