398. Stalin: The Great Terror (Part 4)
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Who was Sergei Kirov and why was his murder a catalyst for Stalin’s Great Terror?
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From a murder in Leningrad in 1934 to the ruins of Stalingrad nine years later, this is the story of how Stalin turned terror into the central weapon of his rule. Sergei Kirov was a popular party boss and he was a possible rival to Stalin. Within months, he was shot dead in circumstances that were never properly investigated. So did Stalin order? to order the killing or did he exploit it to unleash what we now know as the Great Terror? And after purging his army and ignoring repeated warnings of a German invasion, how did he use that same machinery of fear to stop the Soviet Union from collapsing? Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnund.
And me, William Durampel.
Now in this episode, we are going to be talking a a little less about who Stalin was and a little more about what he actually did with all of the power that he spent thirty years accumulating.
It's a grim and dark episode. Um, now in the last episode, which was also fairly grim and fairly dark, we left Trotsky dead in August uh 1940 with an ice pick in the back of his head. Oh,
didn't we say it was an ice axe? Didn't we have this huge convers in-depth conversation? It is, in fact, an ice axe.
Now, today we're going to lay the groundwork for Stalin's extraordinary rise to the top. But we may have to go back a little in time to sow the seeds of the story with yet another gruesome murder, which is how we like to roll on this particular pod. We are joined once again by our gruesome friend Charles Milton. Uh joining us from love from Joining us from lovely. Well,
Burgundy. There's a build up,
Giles.
I've n I've never been introduced like that before. Thanks, Willie.
I see. So the fragrant and charming Giles Milton. Giles, most importantly, I mean those of you who've been following the series has been our wonderful guide and he is the author of The Stalin Affair, The Impossible Alliance that won the war. Can we start by just doing a a a pen sketch of Sergei Kirov and just how important Kirov was to the Bolshevik machine?
He was an old uh fellow revolutionary, a great friend of Stalin. He'd been a supporter of the Bolsheviks from the very beginning, really. And it became apparent as uh Stalin was tightening his grasp on power that there was one potential rival, and that was Sergei Kirov. And I think that um Stalin realized that Kirov represented a very real danger to his grip on power. That it would be much easier to dispose of him, get rid of him. And so, as you as you said, he was to be murdered. The great mystery is: was Stalin actively implicated in his murder, or did other people see the way the wind was blowing and decided to take it into their own hands? We just don't know. It's a mystery that's gone on ever since it took place, and we don't know, but the consequences were to prove remarkable.
Uh are grim and gruesome because this would unleash the great terror.
Yeah, I mean just just before we get into sort of the the the mechanisms of of the murder as well, we should say that, you know, Stalin is a paranoid nut by this point.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Who was Sergei Kirov and why was his murder a catalyst for Stalin’s Great Terror?
0:01–7:25
2
How did Stalin use the Kirov assassination to launch the first show trials of the 1930s?
7:25–16:13
3
What role did the NKVD executioner Vasily Blochin play in the mass killings of the Great Terror?
16:13–31:20
4
Why did Stalin consider the Molotov‑Ribbentrop Pact a diplomatic masterpiece?
31:20–41:44
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Empire: World History
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