Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

Stalin was shaken from his complacency by the shooting dead in December 1934 of Leningrad party secretary Sergei M. Kirov. He rushed to Leningrad to personally interrogate the perpetrator, Leonid Nikolaev. On the way he drafted a draconian decree that abrogated the rights of those accused of terrorism and streamlined their prosecution, conviction and execution. This became the legal basis for thousands of summary shootings during the ensuing campaign of state-sponsored terror against Stalin’s political opponents.⁵⁹

Nikolaev was, in fact, a lone assassin who gunned down Kirov outside his office because of a personal grudge. But suspicions still linger that Stalin was the architect of Kirov’s killing. Like most conspiracy theories about Stalin, there is no hard evidence for such a claim.⁶⁰ Not even Trotsky thought Stalin guilty of this particular crime, although he rightly feared it would be used as a pretext for a further crackdown on the anti-Stalinist opposition.⁶¹

Stalin had his own conspiracy theory: Kirov was a victim of the Zinovievites. On 16 December, Kamenev and Zinoviev were arrested. On 29 December, Nikolaev and thirteen alleged associates were executed, while Kamenev and Zinoviev were imprisoned for abetting the murder. In 1935 hundreds of former Zinovievites were rounded up and the scope of the investigation was broadened to include former Trotskyists.

In his coerced confession, Zinoviev said: ‘Because we were unable to properly submit to the party, merge with it completely but instead continued to look backward and to live our separate, stifling lives – because of all that, we were doomed to the kind of political dualism that produces double-dealing’.⁶²

In June 1935 Stalin’s deputy security chief, Nikolai Yezhov, presented a report to the central committee claiming that Kamenev, Zinoviev and Trotsky were ‘the active organisers of the murder of comrade Kirov, as well as of the attempt on the life of Comrade Stalin that was being prepared within the Kremlin’.⁶³

The latter charge was a reference to the so-called ‘Kremlin Affair’, which began when three cleaners confessed to spreading slander about the state and its leaders. Among those implicated in anti-Soviet activities were three librarians working in the Kremlin’s government library. Of the 110 Kremlin staff arrested, 108 were imprisoned or exiled and two shot.⁶⁴

Stalin was fond of giving lessons in realpolitik to soft-hearted western intellectuals and in June 1935 he told the well-known French writer Romain Rolland that a hundred armed agents from Germany, Poland and Finland had been shot for plotting terrorist attacks on Kirov and other Soviet leaders:

Such is the logic of power. In these conditions power must be strong, hard and fearless. Otherwise it’s not power and won’t be recognised as such. The French Communards didn’t understand this, they were too soft and indecisive. Consequently, they lost, and the French bourgeoisie was merciless. That’s the lesson for us. . . . It is very unpleasant for us to kill. This is a dirty business. Better to be out of politics and keep one’s hands clean, but we don’t have the right to stay out of politics if we want to liberate enslaved people. When you agree to engage in politics, then you do everything not for yourself but only for the state. The state demands that we are pitiless.⁶⁵

He also told Rolland about the Kremlin Affair:

We have a government library, which has female librarians who can enter the apartments of responsible comrades in the Kremlin in order to tidy up their libraries. It turns out that some of these librarians had been recruited by our enemies for the purposes of terrorism. It has to be said that these librarians are remnants of the old, defeated ruling classes – the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. We found out that these women had poison and intended to poison some of our officials.⁶⁶

Egged on by Yezhov, Stalin decided to stage a public trial of Kamenev, Zinoviev and fourteen others accused of being the leaders of a ‘United Trotskyite-Zinovievite Centre’ that had organised the network that killed Kirov and plotted to assassinate other Soviet leaders. Stalin, together with Chief State Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, drafted the detailed indictment and the trial took place in Moscow in August 1936. Having confessed to their crimes, all sixteen defendants were found guilty and executed. Trotsky and his son, Lev Sedov, were sentenced to death in absentia.

As Wendy Goldman so aptly summarises events so far: ‘The case, which began in December 1934 with a domestic murder and a lone gunman, now involved sixteen defendants, multiple murder plots, foreign spies, fascist contacts, and terrorist conspiracies. The initial objective, to find and punish Kirov’s assassin, had expanded into a nationwide attack on the former left opposition.’⁶⁷