The Kirov Affair

Drawing on hundreds of newly available, top-secret KGB and party Central Committee documents, historian Matthew E. Lenoe reexamines the 1934 assassination of Leningrad party chief Sergei Kirov. Joseph Stalin used the killing as the pretext to unleash the Great Terror that decimated the Communist elite in 1937–1938; these previously unavailable documents raise new questions about whether Stalin himself ordered the murder, a subject of speculation since 1938.The book includes translations of 125 documents from the various investigations of the Kirov murder, allowing readers to reach their own conclusions about Stalin’s involvement in the assassination.

The 1934 murder of the charismatic politician Sergei Kirov sparked Stalin's brutal purges, and speculation about it still fascinates the Russians. Who killed Kirov, and why? In Russia, conspiracy theories about Kirov have abounded, and scholars throughout the world have tackled various pieces of the story -- but definitive evidence has eluded them. Now Amy Knight has combed the recently opened Russian archives to reconstruct this fascinating crime and analyze its effect on the Russian people. The result is at once an intriguing murder mystery and a major piece of scholarship that sheds new light on the terrors of Stalin.

"On December 1, 1934 Leningrad Party leader Sergei M. Kirov was murdered. Investigation of this crime soon led to the three public Moscow "Show" Trials, to the "Tukhachevsky Affair" trial of eight top Army commanders; and then to the "Ezhovshchina" or "Great Terror". Was Leonid Nikolaev, Kirov's killer, a lone gunman acting from personal motives whose crime Stalin then "used" to frame and execute real or imagined enemies? Or was Nikolaev's arrest the key event that led to the uncovering "the great conspiracy against Soviet Russia"? Grover Furr has studied all the available evidence, most of it from formerly-secret Soviet archives. He offers complete and original translations of key historical documents and detailed analysis of their significance in an important synthesis that effectively reconsiders one of the pivotal events of Soviet history. Furr also examines in detail the three latest studies of the Kirov murder - by Alla Kirilina, Åsmund Egge, and Matthew Lenoe. His discovery: all the "authoritative" studies of the Kirov murder are hopelessly wrong. Written with the same meticulous attention to detail as his 2011 work "Khrushchev Lied, " Furr's book "The Murder of Sergei Kirov: History, Scholarship and the Anti-Stalin Paradigm" is a bold rejoinder to decades of omission, distortion and misinformation by Soviet, Russian, and Western historians."--Back cover.

On September 5, 1945, cipher clerk Igor Gouzenko severed ties with the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, reporting to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police allegations of extensive Soviet espionage in North America, providing stolen documents detailing Soviet intelligence matters to back his claims. This action sent shockwaves through Washington, London, Moscow, and Ottawa, changing the course of the twentieth century. Using recently declassified FBI and Canadian RCMP files on the Gouzenko case, author and Cold War scholar Amy Knight sheds new light on the FBI's efforts to incriminate Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White in order to discredit the Truman Administration. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover seized upon Gouzenko's defection as a means through which to demonize the Soviets, distorting statements made by Gouzenko to stir up "spy fever" in the U.S., setting the McCarthy era into motion. Through the FBI files and interviews with several key players, Knight delves into Gouzenko's reasons for defecting and brilliantly connects these events to the strained relations between the Soviet Union and the West, marking the beginning of the Cold War.

"The definitive work on Stalin's purges, the author's The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. Provides accounts of on everything form the three great 'Moscow Trials' to methods of obtaining confessions, the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, on life in the labor camps, and many other key matters. On the fortieth anniversary of thew first edition, it is remarkable how many of the most disturbing conclusions have born up under the light of fresh evidence." --

Understanding the Cold War is the story of a man and an epoch. Its telling moves between detailed personal history and an Olympian assessment of the origins, significant events, and outcome of the Cold War. Professor Ulam describes his hometown, family, and early education, as well as his departure, with his brother, for the U.S. just days before the Nazi invasion of Poland would have trapped them. Then follows reminiscences of his college and Harvard years, all rich with anecdote and insight, and his thoughts as an acknowledged expert on Soviet affairs. The volume offers basic antidotes to simplistic explanations. Whether discussing the Kirov assassination or the Moscow Trials of the so-called Trotskyist Bloc, or the nationalist basis of disputes between China and Russia during the Vietnam War period, Ulam avoids the sensational and the speculative in favor of the the empirical and the evidentiary. The core segments of the work review the Cold War from the belly of the Stalinist and later post-Stalinist communist system. And in a section entitled "The Beginning of the End," Ulam discusses the Gorbachev interregnum and the early years of the transition from communism to democracy. He well appreciates how the ease of the transition does not betoken a simple movement to the democratic camp. In contemplating the changing nature of the new political configuration, one could hardly have a better guide to clarity and authenticity than Adam Ulam. Reviewing Understanding the Cold War, Stephen Kotkin, director of Princeton's Russian Studies Program, observed "...And whereas some celebrated analysts, such as John Maynard Keynes, had dismissed Marxism as 'illogical and dull,' Ulam highlighted the doctrine's intricacy and comprehensiveness, which, he argued, explained its attraction not just to peasants, but also to intellectuals."

The first major study by a Russian Marxist Historian of the Stalinist purges which are often collectively reffered to by the year they reached their greatest intensity: 1937. Rogovin shows that the purges were aimed at the physical annihilation of the growing socialist opposition to Stalin's bureaucratic regime. Focused on Leon Trotsky and his thousands of supporters, the purges were a blow against the October Revolution, its leaders and its heritage.