Book description
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…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Kirov Murder and Soviet History as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
For a few brief years following the fall of communism in Russia, the archives were opened to (even) foreign academics.
The result was a wealth of new detail on post-1917 Russia. In 1934 Sergei Kirov, Leningrad party chief and one of Stalin’s favourite ‘sons’, was assassinated. As this book makes clear, it was the work of a disaffected party member and enabled by the deliberately lax security arrangements that Kirov himself sought. However, the murder also served as the pretext for the Great Terror.
The value of the book is not merely in answering the question surrounding the murder itself…
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