Who Killed Kirov

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.

Draws on recently declassified documents as well as other evidence to investigate the 1934 murder of Sergei Kirov, Leningrad Communist Party chief, senior ranking Politburo member, and prize orator of the Stalin regime

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.

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"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." --

"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.

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