Who Killed Kirov?: The Kremlin's Greatest Mystery

by Amy Knight

Release Date: May, 2000

Edition: Paperback

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Who doesn't know?

Unless as one writer suggests, new documentation with the credibility to give the information credence is introduced, this book offers very little in any event. There were some photographs that I had not seen in other books, and the floor plan and the alleged positioning of security was interesting. For this book to suggest this killing has the same mystery surrounding the Kennedy assassination is absurd.

There are many who believe that Kennedy was not solely the victim of Oswald, and while one can speculate who actually pulled the trigger in the case of the murder of Kirov, it is the less important part of the incident, what Soviet History might have been under Kirov is the story.

Kirov embodied many things that Stalin did not and could not emulate; he was charismatic, "The People" truly liked the man, and he was not the disfigured paranoid maniac that was Stalin. When the fateful vote took place and Kirov had clearly become a rival to Stalin's power, it was only a question of how soon he would die, and how large the purge that followed his death would be. It would indeed be massive, for how else was Stalin to show how devastated and full of revenge he was, for the death of his "friend" Kirov? Stalin had no friends.

Stalin wanted Kirov dead, he ordered the killing, and whether the NKVD, or as is likely the poor guy they picked up and pinned it on actually did the killing, the killer is secondary. The story here is that Stalin could carry out the hit on Kirov, knowing he would be suspect number one, and further being 100% confident that no individual or group would accuse him, that is part of the interesting History here. The bloodbath that followed was just Stalin getting rid of more of his "enemies" real or mostly imagined.

If there were a book written for the purpose of identifying every killer Stalin employed, the number of books would run into the tens of millions. The fact that he could kill on such an unprecedented scale, that he could remain in control, that he managed to always have enough believers/supporters/future victims to back him is what fascinates. Kirov may have been the marquee kill of Stalin's reign, but he was just that, one more body

I would like to read a well written historically based work of fiction that posits what would have happened had Kirov not been killed, what if Stalin was blamed, what if Kirov took control of the former USSR. That is where the interest lies.

The title of this book is bordering on misleading. Nothing inside the book is as intriguing as the question asked on the cover wishes you to believe.

New primary documents & good writing yield a great book.

Sergei Kirov's assassination in 1934 has often been compared to President Kennedy's assassination some 30 years later. Indeed both shared similarities such as inexplicable bullets and the murder of an eyewitness shortly afterwards. But whereas Kennedy's death led to the rise of LBJ and his "Great Society" initiatives, Kirov's death led directly to Stalin's great purges preceding World War II, with the Soviet slaughter of approximately a million individuals.

For many years, information surrounding Kirov has been shrouded in official secrecy. Now, however, much more information has been made available by the Russian government, and historian/researcher Amy Knight has delved into primary documentation that has been heretofore unavailable. Knight is no stranger to Russian historical research, and her experience pays off with an intriguing and fascinating story. Tracing Kirov's impoverished roots in the north, to his revolutionary political activities as a college student, through his meteoric rise in Bolshevik politics, and finally examining the mysterious circumstances surrounding his murder, Knight gives us a primer in early Soviet history and introduces us to the major historical characters who were intertwined in Kirov's life.

Inevitably, Stalin is implicated as being complicit in Kirov's death, and perhaps arranging it for political purposes. That Kirov's murder was used as an excuse to launch his purges is without doubt. Knight has done an exceptional job of research and has gone the extra mile to produce a readable and interesting book.