Three books

Who Killed Kirov?

By Amy Knight

Hill and Wang

332 pages, hardcover, $26

Yeltsin’s Russia

By Lilia Shevtsova

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

346 pages, softcover, $19.95

The Post-Soviet Handbook

A Guide to Grassroots Organizations and Internet Resources

Center for Civil Society International and University of Washington Press

400 pages, softcover, $19.95

“He only blames injustice who, owing to cowardice or age or some weakness, has not the power of being unjust. And this is proved by the fact that when he obtains the power, he immediately becomes as unjust as far as he can be.”

 — Plato, The Republic 

(Adeimantus, Republic II)

Sixty-five years ago, on December 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, a full member of the Soviet Politburo and First Secretary of Leningrad, was assassinated. With suspicious alacrity, General Secretary Josef Stalin put in place new criminal procedures for cases of terrorism, requiring speedy investigation, denying rights of representation or appeal and permitting summary execution. Stalin then raced off to Leningrad to head up the investigation of the murder, with the entire Moscow investigative group of the NKVD, a deputy prosecutor and several Politburo members in tow. The Terror had begun.

For six decades, there have been countless unsolved mysteries surrounding the murder of Kirov at his Smolny office by Leonid Nikolaev, a disaffected and unbalanced Party member. Witnesses died under suspicious circumstances, testimonies were supressed or altered, and important written evidence disappeared. No explanation has ever been given how the assassin knew Kirov would unexpectedly stop in his office that day, nor has it been explained how Nikolaev got past such high security. 

But to Stalin, there were no mysteries. Kirov’s murder was a strike at the core of the Party leadership by its enemies. And enemies, it turned out, were everywhere. The Leningrad Party organization was purged for its “laxism” and “complicity” in the killing. Charges were also immediately trumped up against the “leftist opposition” in the party—Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky. When the opponents on the left were rooted out, Stalin turned on the right, and Bukharin and Rykov were accused of plotting with “Zinovievite-Trotskyite terrorists” to murder Kirov, among other grave crimes. But these were just the leaders. The purge of the Party and society was widespread—some 2 million Soviets were arrested and either shot or sent to camps between 1935 and 1938.

Speculation about the inconsistencies of witness testimonies and about evidence of the NKVD’s and Stalin’s involvement in Kirov’s murder has long overshadowed the person of Sergei Kirov. This makes Amy Knight’s excellent new biography of Kirov a welcome addition to the historical record. After sifting through much newly declassified material from Russian archives, Knight offers a complete and intimate portrait of Kirov and the dyna-mics of his interaction with the other early Bolshevik leaders. She shows a decade-long tension and rivalry between Kirov and Stalin, a fact long known, but never so persuasively documented or so skillfully narrated.

Most interestingly, Knight shows the slow and reluctant transformation of Kirov from a hard-working, idealistic, principled young man into a leader with a willingness to terrorize and kill his own citizens en masse. Indeed, it is one of the great questions of our century how the best educated, most “enlightened” of Russia’s leaders could turn into such vicious murderers.

In the end, Knight concludes that the available evidence shows the NKVD organized Kirov’s assassination, likely at Stalin’s behest. Of course, this conclusion is unsurprising. As Knight writes, “what is so significant about the Kirov case is not just the compelling evidence pointing to Stalin’s complicity in the murder but the fact that this evidence was ignored. In attempting to understand why, it is necessary to look not only at Stalin but also at his victims, men like Sergo [Ordzhonokidze], Bukharin, and other members of the party leadership who were later purged. The ultimate blame for the success of Stalin’s audacious crime—if such it was—lies with them. It was not just fear of the secret police that kept them silent ... they doubtless thought that, if they created an open conflict by opposing Stalin, they would bring the system crashing down.”

Tyranny thrives on such fears—the greatest sign of its weakness. For if the system is so fragile that it can be threatened by disagreements between leaders or the dissatisfaction of the governed, it is rotten to the core. It can only be preserved by terror and totalitarian control.

After Stalin’s death, the terror ebbed. The authoritarian-bureaucratic behemoth that the Soviet state had become lumbered on for three decades, finally drowning in tar pits of economic inefficiency and political illegitimacy. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was unbounded hope for the New Russia: sloughing off the communist deadweight, Russia would surely become liberal democratic and capitalist, right? Apparently not. The Russia we see now, ten years after its “rebirth,” looks more like the Byzantine autocracy of the system that preceded Soviet rule than like the liberal democracies in the rest of Europe.

The reason for this development (devolution?), says Lilia Shevtsova, in Yeltsin’s Russia, can largely be traced to the person and peculiarities of Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin rose to the presidency of Russia, Shevtsova argues, because he had an “amazing ability to play two different roles simultaneously: that of rebel and that of adherent to the old system.” He rebelled against whatever hindered his acquisition or maintenance of power, but he lapsed into Soviet-style dogmatism at the first sign of any attempt to limit his power, to dissent from his view of what is right. To Yeltsin, Shevtsova says, “power is more important than life itself; he acts as if he were Russia’s destiny.” As if that were not enough, this dangerous lust for power is overlaid on an insatiable appetite for crises—the singular importance of which is that they allow him to show he is still in control, to “overturn the chessboard” and reset the game.

Shevtsova’s chronicle of the Yeltsin years and her speculation on the coming post-Yeltsin era is as insightful as it is worrying. This is particularly true in her analysis of the sell-out by Russia’s democrats. By supporting the creation of a “superpresidential regime” after the 1993 crisis, the democrats and intellectuals, Shevtsova shows, were complicit in its irresponsible wars in the Caucasus, its wholesale theft of state assets and the breakdown of civil society. This intelligentsia (e.g. Yegor Gaidar, Sergei Shakhrai, Anatoly Chubais and others) became a “super-elite” which shaped the Yeltsin regime while eschewing democratic principles. Rather than work to build strong democratic institutions and a system of checks and balances, they used the 1993 crisis to argue for—and win—a “civilized authoritarianism.” As, Shevtsova writes, “if not even those who call themselves democrats actively follow democratic rules, what can be expected of other members of the political establishement?”

Certainly, Russia in the early 1990s faced other obstacles to the development of true democracy. Shevtsova describes them well: the awesome power of the oil and gas monopolies, the need to create a new, multi-ethnic state overnight, the absence of traditions of private property and political freedoms. But, she argues, the critical factor in shaping the present kleptocracy was the “liberals’” choice of an authoritarian model for changing Russia over a democratic one. And their reason for this choice was simple: it offered better chances for personal enrichment.

So it should not be surprising that the Russian population has become increasingly alienated from politics, that they pin little hope on the state solving society’s urgent problems. While the state spends half a billion dollars renovating the Kremlin (complete with the requisite kickback schemes), teachers and miners go unpaid. While Duma deputies vote to raise their own salaries, orphanages and hospitals go unfunded.

Thankfully, grassroots organizations have begun stepping in to fill the void created by government inaction. As catalogued in superb detail in The Post Soviet Handbook, citizen groups have sprung up across the former Soviet Union, from environmental groups in Novokuznetsk to a group in Tomsk dedicated to defending the rights of children, to a group in Lviv dedicated to education about sexually-transmitted diseases. They are doing important, necessary work, holding together the fabric of Russian society. The revised edition of this useful book will help concerned Russophiles in the West find out more about who is doing what, and hopefully to lend a helping hand or send a needed contribution.

Interestingly, just over ten years ago, citizen groups in Russia could not exist outside state control. True citizen action, based on individual initiative, was seen as a threat to the authority of the regime: the Party knew and foresaw all, so how could a group of individuals know better what actions were needed? And God forbid such groups through their actions should openly challenge state policies; obviously such individuals or groups suffered from psychotic delusions and needed to be locked up to protect themselves and society.

Russia has seen more than its share of tyranny in this century. And despite all the problems and challenges that Russia faces today, despite all the kleptocracy and Byzantine politics, the activities of citizen action groups like those listed in The Post-Soviet Handbook are a substantial bulwark against future tyranny. These grass-roots organizations are purely democratic forces. They offer dissent, question authority, protest pollution, war and injustice—in short, they simply do what this or that local group of citizens feels needs to be done to make Russians’ lives more livable, more rewarding. God knows the power mongers in the Kremlin haven’t got a clue how to do that.

— Paul Richardson

The books reviewed in this column are available at bookstores nationwide, and through Access Russia: ph. 800-639-4301, fax 802-223-4955, 89 Main Street, #2, Montpelier, VT 05602. Access Russia on the web: www.rispubs.com; or email: [email protected], Shipping charges apply.