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Post by dodger on Sept 17, 2013 14:26:05 GMT
This William Podmore review is from: The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (Annals of Communism) (Hardcover)
This book is now out of date.
Lenoe rightly cleared Stalin of any blame for the murder of Kirov, contrary to the lies of Trotskyists. But Lenoe upheld the 'lone gunman' theory, which has now been comprehensively refuted.
New research by Grover Furr has proved that Kirov was indeed killed by an anti-communist group of Trotskyists and Zinovievites, as the Soviet government claimed at the time. See Furr's book, 'The murder of Sergei Kirov: history, scholarship and the anti-Stalin paradigm', published by Erythros Press and Media in 2013.
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Stalin and the Kirov Murder (Hardcover)
by Robert Conquest
This book is now out of date.
New research by Grover Furr has proved that Kirov was indeed killed by an anti-communist group of Trotskyists and Zinovievites. See his book, 'The murder of Sergei Kirov: history, scholarship and the anti-Stalin paradigm', published by Erythros Press and Media in 2013.
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Post by dodger on Sept 17, 2013 14:31:43 GMT
A magnificent study, thoroughly-researched., July 5, 2013
By William Podmore
This review is from: The Murder of Sergei Kirov: History, Scholarship and the Anti-Stalin Paradigm (Paperback)
In this magnificent, thoroughly-researched book, Grover Furr examines Leonid Nikolaev's murder of Stalin's close colleague Sergei Kirov on 1 December 1934. Furr uses new evidence from those parts of the Russian archives that have been released, and materials from the Trotsky Archive at Harvard University and the Volkogonov Archive, which prove that Nikolaev acted as part of a Zinovievist terrorist group.
With Stalin's support, Kirov had broken Grigory Zinoviev's hold over Leningrad and replaced him as First Secretary of the Bolshevik Party in the city. The Opposition could not defeat him politically, so they decided to kill him.
Khrushchev told the 1960-1961 investigation, run by the Party Control Committee (KPK), to blame Stalin for the Kirov murder. But it could produce no evidence to this effect and had to conclude that Stalin was not involved.
Khrushchev then adopted the `lone gunman' thesis. Furr analyses Matthew Lenoe's book The Kirov murder and Soviet history, published by Yale University Press in 2010, and Alla Kirilina's book Rikoshet, published in 1993, which both argued this thesis.
The Zinovievist-Trotskyist opposition believed that Stalin had betrayed the revolution, that he was the grave digger of the revolution as Trotsky called him, so they felt they had to remove him. As Valentin Astrov, a follower of Bukharin, stated, Bukharin said in January 1930, "it would be necessary at any cost to remove Stalin."
This had to mean by assassination, since the only alternative was to win a majority of the Party Congress or Central Committee, which the opposition could never achieve. After the demise of the Soviet Union, Astrov denied he was coerced into making this statement.
The truths about the conspiracies were revealed step by step in the December 1934 trial of Nikolaev, in the Moscow trials of August 1936 and January 1937, the Tukhachevsky affair of May-June 1937, and the trial of March 1938.
Zinoviev's collaborator Lev Kamenev admitted on 23 July 1936, "we, that is the Zinovievist center of the counterrevolutionary organization, the membership of which I have named above, and the Trotskyist counterrevolutionary organization in the persons of Smirnov, Mrachkovskii and Ter-Vaganian, agreed in 1932 about the union of both, i.e. the Zinovievist and Trotskyist counterrevolutionary organization for cooperative organization of terrorist acts against the leaders of the CC and first of all against Stalin and Kirov."
The Harvard Trotsky Archive provided further evidence that the Zinovievist-Trotskyist bloc existed from 1932 onwards. For example, Trotsky's son Sedov wrote to Trotsky in mid-1932 that the bloc "is organized. In it have entered the Zinovievites, the Sten-Lominadze group and the Trotskyists ... The declaration of Z. and K. concerning their enormous mistake in '27 was made during negotiations with our people concerning the bloc ..."
The Archive also provided proof that Trotsky communicated with the bloc's members, including Karl Radek, Sokol'nikov, Preobrazhenskii and Kollontai, despite his lies to the contrary to the Dewey Commission and in his Bulletin of the Opposition. Trotsky's letter to Radek of 3 March 1932 was a directive to `remove the leadership'. Furr also relates how this Archive has been purged, as the Trotskyist writer Pierre Broué admitted, presumably to hide even more incriminating materials.
Zinoviev said on 28 July 1936, "I must add that a plan was developed for hiding the traces of the crimes that were under preparation by the united Trotskyite-Zinovievite center. The forcible removal of the leaders of the Party and government had to be very carefully disguised as White Guardist acts or acts of `personal vengeance'." Zinoviev admitted that Nikolaev attended a meeting of the Leningrad centre of the Opposition. All this is strong evidence against the thesis that Nikolaev was a `lone gunman'.
From the interrogation of Genrikh Yagoda, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, on 26 April 1937:
"Question: You had materials about the active terrorist centers?
Answer: I had.
Question: Kirov was killed by them?
Answer: By them.
Question: You concealed the activity of these terrorist organizations?
Answer: I did."
Under Russia's 75-year rule, materials on Kirov's murder and Nikolaev's trial should have been released by now, but they haven't - why not, if they support the Khrushchev/Gorbachev line that Nikolaev was a `lone gunman'? So this hidden evidence must show that it was true that the Trotskyite-Zinovievite bloc was guilty of Kirov's murder.
Khrushchev never managed to bring forward from the archives any evidence that pointed to the defendants' innocence. In 1956 he ordered the KGB to destroy the records of the surveillance operation against the Zinovievists.
The notion that Nikolaev acted alone and that the Zinovievist-Trotskyist bloc was a fiction is part of the anti-Stalin paradigm which has structured the West's historiography of the Soviet Union for 90 years. This paradigm is a key part of anti-communist, pro-capitalist politics. Furr has put together the evidence that proves the existence of the bloc and its responsibility for Kirov's murder.
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Post by dodger on Sept 17, 2013 14:45:41 GMT
Very useful study of Yezhov, and also of the Kirov murder, March 16, 2012
By William Podmore
This review is from: Yezhov: The Rise of Stalin's "Iron Fist" (Portraits of Revolution series) (Hardcover) by J. Arch Getty (Author) , Oleg V. Naumov (Author)
This is a well-researched contribution to Soviet studies. It traces the rise to power of Nikolai Yezhov, but it also has a vast amount of fascinating information about the infamous assassination of Politburo member Serge Kirov in December 1934.
In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev commissioned his ally Alexander Yakovlev to try to prove Stalin's complicity in Kirov's murder. As the authors write, Yakovlev "pressed for a conclusion implicating Stalin while several of the staff researchers argued that the evidence pointed the other way. Despite the high-level political advantages of implicating Stalin in the Khrushchev and Gorbachev years, no official investigation by even the most anti-Stalin Soviet administrations had accused Stalin of the crime ... The most recent scholarly work on the Kirov assassination from a Russian scholar, based on Leningrad party and police archives, concludes that Stalin had nothing to do with the killing."
The Yakovlev Commission concluded in 1991, "no materials objectively support Stalin's participation or NKVD participation in the organisation and carrying out of Kirov's murder." It stated that only `one-sided, superficial, unverified facts, rumors and conjectures' support the allegations of Stalin's complicity. The Russian government promptly suppressed the report.
Getty and Naumov note, "Stalin's solution was to quickly take the Leningrad NKVD out of the investigation altogether ...", and, as they point out, "Of course, if Stalin had engineered the assassination through the Leningrad NKVD, the best way to organize a cover-up inquiry would have been to leave them in charge."
Kirov's assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, was arrested at once. As the authors observe, "Nikolaev began talking freely from the start. He admitted to having planned the killing for some time because he blamed Kirov for persecution of the Zinoviev group and his resulting unemployment. He said that he had initially planned the killing alone but had then talked to Kotolynov and others, who at first tried to dissuade him. According to Nikolaev, they wanted to kill someone higher up, like Stalin, but they later approved his plan. Nikolaev also admitted to contacts with the Latvian consul in Leningrad, whom he correctly picked from a photo array. Supposedly the consul had funnelled money into the plot through Nikolaev."
Interrogations of Nikolaev's oppositionist friends followed, "In some cases, the accused refused to confess to belonging to any conspiracy and maintained his or her innocence ... Others admitted to belonging to a `counterrevolutionary organization' but not to knowing of Nikolaev's plans. ... Another group admitted to the full accusation: belonging to a criminal conspiracy that organized the assassination."
Grover Furr's study of the Kirov murder, due to be published in Russia in 2012, proves that Kirov's assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, was the gunman for an opposition conspiracy.
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