On December 1, 1934 Sergei Kirov, head of the Leningrad branch of the Communist Party, was assassinated in his office. Initially, it was believed that Joseph Stalin ordered his killing. But why? Earlier in the year at elections for the Central Committee, Kirov supposedly received significantly fewer negative votes than Stalin did, thereby demoting Stalin from General Secretary to simply Secretary. Stalin regarded Kirov as a serious enemy, especially when he formed an anti-Stalin group. Stalin wasted no time allowing people to believe it was he who had Kirov murdered. He quickly took revenge upon other enemies, Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev, by implicating them in Kirov’s death. They agreed to accept responsibility in return for a light sentence. In 1936, they were retried and both condemned to death. This intensely violent moment is an important point in Stalin’s Great Terror that he inflicted upon the Soviet Union in the late 1930s.
