Assassination of S.M Kirov

On December 1, 1934, S. M. Kirov, a prominent member of the Political Bureau of the C.P.S.U. (Bolshevik) Central Committee, who was the First Secretary of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (B). Kirov was assassinated by a counter revolutionary plot at the Smolny Palace in Leningrad. Nikolayev was arrested as the assassin on the spot. The murderer was a man who was recently expelled from the Party and was dissatisfied with that expulsion. There was evidence that the assassin was ordered by some person to commit the crime by using his old party membership card. The next day, the guard in charge of protecting Kirov died in a strange “car accident” on the way to an interrogation work. After that incident, the cadres of the Leningrad branch of the People’s Commissariat of Interior Affairs were trialed and given the severest sentences, and all of them were shot in 1938. Later, in 1956 Khrushchev in his “Secret Report to the 20th Congress of the C.P.S.U. ” argued that there were many unexplained and incomprehensible aspects in this trial, which needed to be dealt with extreme caution, and ordered an examination but the result of this examination was not revealed to public. After the assassination of Kirov, the Soviet Union launched a large-scale campaign against the counterrevolutionaries.